The Crossing of the Rubicon
by Shadow Logic
Summary: Post 'Things Change'. Raven ponders implications, Beast Boy confronts facts, and both contemplate a decision. BBRae
1. The Casting of the Die

_Dedicated to CalliopeMused. If you ever see this: you rule forever. Raven's love for oriental food is a tribute to you._

* * *

The takeout carton was warm. The common room was empty. Raven perched it carefully on the coffee table and set herself up for her meal.

The fight against the shapeshifting creature had been cut almost laughably short after Beast Boy reached the Recycle Center and they managed to turn the thing into flesh and blood. A complex police investigation was underway to determine what the creature was, which took some of the weight of investigative responsibility from Robin, leaving them free to go home and enjoy the mostly crimeless city for a while. Robin hadn't even felt the need to reprimand Beast Boy for his absence.

On the other hand, Beast Boy was such a compact, unyielding mass of sadness and angst once he did appear that Robin might as well have torn him a new one or three. He hadn't even insisted on pizza afterwards, though their last attempt to subdue the creature was a success almost entirely thanks to him. Questions concerning Terra were met with determined silence and avoidance.

To her empathic powers, he'd felt as grimly resolute as he had just after the messenger drone from the Doom Patrol had broken into the tower. It was a far cry from the bone-deep joy he'd been exuding from being home after spending the better part of a year away, even different from the more familiar righteous grit she'd begun to sense in him during said year. It was foreign to the very nature of the Beast Boy she knew, and she didn't like it.

Thanks to his shortness, none of them needed to be empaths to know something was wrong with Beast Boy. But the chase had been exhausting and even Starfire had agreed that they'd look over the problem with renewed eyes after some rest and maybe a good night's sleep, so they had gone straight back to the tower after the creature was secured and transported away. They even left each other to their own devices for dinner because Cyborg was too tired to cook and the general disposition too somber to wrangle everyone into a big family meal.

Because while he was unquestionably the largest blip in the radar, it _wasn't_ just Beast Boy. All of them were affected by the changes. Cyborg was waxing philosophical about the forward march of technology that had sunk video rental stores while they weren't looking, Starfire was concerned about _rekma _(the drifting, Raven recalled), which had prompted Robin, easily the most adaptable of the five, to have a long talk with her on the roof. Judging by the gentle hum of content she could sense from up there, it was going fairly well, but there were occasional flares of fear and uncertainty enough to keep her on her toes.

Raven considered herself only slightly less adjustable than Robin. Self-awareness derived from meditation and a hotline to her own emotions helped her deal better, and while she had her own pondering to do, her melancholy would not be overwhelming: the bookstore had been a pleasant constant, one she'd been glad to find when she first came to Jump City, and she would mourn its loss. She'd been disquieted about her own variation of rekma over the past several months, because their missions didn't always involve being together, and at times she'd felt convinced they'd be too far changed after their world tour to fit back together. But here they were back at the T shaped tower out in the bay, somehow even more seamlessly entwined than before, and if the machinations of an entire board of criminals handpicked by a brain couldn't break up the Titans, she had her doubts about time being any more successful.

Head heavy with dark thoughts and contradictorily buoyant emotions, Raven had retired quietly to her room to ponder until her stomach remembered dinner, and cooking was still not her forte. So she'd melted through the shadows to her favorite Chinese place (still there, thankfully) for a late night meal.

The wontons were crunchy, the noodles of her chicken Lo Mein flavorful, and she alternated between their vinegar-and-salty taste and the breaded vegetables.

The food was hot and bracing. The common room was quiet and empty.

Sweet and sour.

* * *

As the moon began to rise to the middle of the sky later that evening, Raven sensed the cloud of discontent moving to and fro about the tower. The stress levels associated to being a cape in charge of a city full of people made insomnia relatively common to all of them, particularly when alarms could go off at any hour of the day or night. Ordinarily, however, only Robin and herself would be awake late into the night, Robin filing or compiling or analyzing, Raven enjoying a time when all the nearby minds were quiet and she could let some of the more taxing mental precautions go.

Beast Boy and his cloud wandered down her hallway, slowing slightly when he passed her door but never stopping. He went by again not too long afterwards, heading for the main hall and the elevator shaft, probably meaning he'd be heading for his rocky outcropping out by the shore. Raven counted fifteen minutes before melting through the floor.

He was in his preferred seat, looking up at the sky. This far from the city, with the lights from the tower off for the night, it was alive with stars.

She picked her way carefully across the rocks, but even her silent stride was detectable to animal ears.

"Hey Rae." She didn't answer, coming to sit in her own spot just to the right of him. She gazed up at the sky herself, and Beast Boy turned slightly to her with a deep, slow exhalation. "I like it when I can see the stars."

"They do help put things in perspective."

"I guess. We're here all puny, they're out there, kilometers away…" There was a hint of melancholy in his talk of distance. Raven looked back up, sensing it a wrong time to try digging through his soul, but still the moment was fragile and heavy with his longing for things vast and nameless. Her eyes traced the subtle lines of the constellations she could recall, and caught at the sight of a moderately bright star, one she remembered was named Alpheratz.

She moved her shoulders back slightly in a jolt of recognition. "Andromeda"

"Huh?"

"There." She thought nothing of drawing closer, matching their perspectives so she could point out the bright pinpricks of light. She connected the stars with her finger. One had to use a little imagination to replace the simple lines for the image of a young woman bound to a rock, but Beast Boy's problem was usually his excess of it.

"Oooh." A pause. "Let me guess, the monks on Azarath?" It was Raven's typical answer when she was asked why she knew this or that, despite never having gone through any earthly school system.

"…no."

"Woah, really?"

"Azarath is another dimension. The stars there are completely different." In the light of day, idling in the common room with all their friends, she would have left it at that. But the significance of this rocky outcropping always brought out her talkative streak, even if what passed for talkative in Raven would have been near muteness in Beast Boy. "When I decided to come to Earth, I was warned that no amount of reading would help me with cultural norms and personal interaction. They aren't something you can learn theoretically. It was a…jarring thought. But I had to do something. So I tried reading about other particular Earth things, to create a sense of familiarity." What she really meant was that she'd wanted constants to hold on to so being in an entirely different dimension wouldn't panic her into destroying the world, but Beast Boy nodded like he understood. "I found authors that the monks hadn't considered very formative, like Lovecraft. I knew of poetry from Poe, but not his stories. I read those. I even gave King a try."

"King? As in Stephen King?"

"If I say yes, will you stop looking so smug?"

He smiled, just the slightest bit contrite. "It's just, whenever I catch you, it's books with really freaky names in Latin or authors smug Lit professors would get giggly over. Not mainstream horror stuff, and definitely not Stephen King."

She shrugged, smiling slightly at the implied compliment. "I thought _It_ was…OK." Even if she did prefer a more subtle art in what she read, she would always be a little partial to posses of misfits, banding together against malignant, interdimensional horrors.

"Really!? Dude, we have got to watch that for movie night next!" He positively beamed. Raven forcibly shoved away the thought of reminding him the video rental market was down for the count. "But you haven't finished the thing about the stars."

_Oh, right_. She nodded in acquiescence, but let the silence stretch between them for a moment longer, contemplative. "It's the little things that make you feel like you're here or there. Smells. Sounds. I thought about looking up and seeing entirely different stars…so I learned about constellations." But then she'd discovered the brightness of modern cities cancelled out their lights, and she'd never had the chance to test that knowledge. Not until she'd been roped into taking up residence in a giant T out on the ocean, and suddenly the sky had come alive with stars she'd known of, but never seen until then.

Beast Boy's entire body shifted slightly towards her just a few more degrees, his eyes wide and eager. "I...I totally, _totally_ get where you're coming from. I mean, I lived in the city enough to know it, but I spent most of my childhood in Amazon jungles, then in Congo, so that's a totally different universe, kinda. I was used to the animal sounds and smells like moist earth, so coming back to the smog and the cars and the random ambulance in the middle of the night…I was really glad when Rita and Mento sprung me free. The ship had different sounds, but they grew on you faster."

Raven didn't ask why Beast Boy always referred to Mento by his alias and the rest of the Doom Patrol got first name basis. She didn't need to. Not when the woman who'd birthed her was 'Arella' in her mind more than she ever was 'mother'.

It was a thing between them. _The_ thing. She and Starfire bonded over a literal trading of bodies, Robin shared her drive and discipline, Cyborg over patient, delicate acts of creation. But her and Beast Boy, despite their vastly different personalities, shared a deep understanding of the fibers of the other's being. They didn't need to swap life stories to feel a profound sense of comprehension when they were in each other's presence, even with the jokes and evasions (though Raven was becoming less and less prone to evading, particularly after almost losing all of them), and when they did, they often discovered how their fundamental fractures, the blows life had given them, felt the same. In the other's skin, they'd see, here and there, the same scars.

"So, Rae. Andromeda was this greek lady who did stuff, right?"

Raven almost chuckled. "You learned Greek Mythology from the cereal box too?"

"Nah. Sticker things inside the candy wrappers."

"Wow." She deadpanned, more for comedic effect, and got to hear Beast Boy's shrill laugh.

"Yeah, I'm totally a scholar." He kicked his legs, boot toes just grazing the water. "Seriously though, what'd she do?"

"She was the daughter of Queen Cassiopeia. She's there." Raven pointed out the M-shaped line of stars that was Cassiopeia. "Cassiopeia bragged that Andromeda was more beautiful than the Nereids (that's sea nymphs, Beast Boy), so they asked Poseidon to punish her. He sent the sea monster Cetus, who'd be there, only he's a little harder to see from here." Cetus was more visible to their region of the sky in other times of the year.

"Huh." He let the toes of his boots sink just a fraction into the water "So Seto killed everyone?"

"Cetus. And no. The king asked for help, and the Oracle of Ammon told him the monster would leave his kingdom alone if he tied Andromeda to a rock and offered her as sacrifice..." Her words tapered off at a sudden transformation beside her. Beast Boy remained very still, but his emotions dimmed abruptly and changed, the delicate happiness from their jokes and jabs fading away like a candleflame on the wind. She saw him lift his boots, off and away from the water. Felt him retreat.

Raven could have slapped herself. Of course. In his state of mind, everything would relate back to Terra. Especially women sacrificing themselves on rocks to save cities from evil monsters.

All her worry, all her carefully dispensed care. And she'd been the one to jostle the healing limb.

She didn't move, even as the space between them, smaller than a hand's span, began feeling like a deep, endless chasm. Beast Boy even turned fractionally, his body no longer facing her. She didn't even consider saying she was sorry, not because of any misplaced sense of pride, but because even apologizing was an act of violence, forcing him to admit that she knew what was on his mind, forcing him to admit that it _was_ on his mind.

She stayed on the shore, still and silent, until he got up and left. It was a petty sort of offering, letting him be the one who left, but she would offer it to him. She had nothing else to give.

Petty triumphs, carefully concealed care.

_Sweet and sour_.


	2. Forfeit

For the next week, they were at a stalemate.

A stalemate, according to Raven's knowledge of the matter, wasn't simply a draw. It did not mean all possible moves were exhausted, or that both players had played with equal skill. No: a stalemate happened when, whichever way he or she moved the remaining pieces, said player would lose. If the choice was to move none of the pieces, the players would remain at a draw, but any move meant choosing to lose. Voluntary defeat.

It wasn't that Beast Boy had played her into a corner. His angst had diminished, his sadness receded for long periods of the day, and his behavior was increasingly the recognizable effervescence of energy that was uniquely his. He'd even managed to catch a rerun of the 1990 miniseries rendition of _It_ for a couple of days' worth of movie nights, and it had felt so much like their lives had been before the Brotherhood, before Trigon and before even Slade, that the content flowing in from all sides had loosened Raven into flicking some popcorn into Beast Boy's hair as Cyborg taunted him about dandruff, with Robin looking on with a smile and Starfire remarking on how odd it was to call dead skin cells 'Dan's Ruff' . He'd laughed and pretended to stuff a handful of popcorn into her hood.

But while he was familiar in the midst of people, Beast Boy slowly regressed when he was alone. His nighttime wandering continued. In the dark, he'd go back out to his rock by the sea, and the sadness would return in full force. The others would notice if it continued into the long term, but for the length of that week, only Raven noticed.

Joining him out on the rocks would have been her first instinct, joining him in his silence, but when she had tried exactly that the day after her faux-pass, Beast Boy's muted sorrow had blossomed into such a daunting display of confusion, anxiety and even fear at the mere sound of her boots that she'd stopped dead in her tracks. She hadn't even tried to conceal the fact that she'd been on her way to see him, simply phasing through the floor to her own room again.

Nobody could say they were avoiding each other, but this was a definite change in their dynamic. When Raven became too reclusive, Beast Boy broke her out. When Beast Boy angsted, Raven would find her way to him. When it came to their push-and-pull, checks-and-balances relationship, this _was_ avoidance, of a kind.

But there was no such thing as permanent estrangement when one was a part of a crimefighting team. Red lights and wailing sirens rang throughout Titans Tower on the Saturday afternoon a week into their unaknowledged impasse.

Four Titans ran in to find Robin at one of the computers in the common room, getting satellite lock on their target "I know it's been a slow few weeks, but we knew it couldn't last. We've got Adonis causing a ruckus in the parking lot of the mall."

* * *

Raven _hated_ fighting Adonis.

It wasn't that there were any villains she particularly liked. As Raven, she liked peace and quiet, and as a heroine, she preferred it when any threats to civilian life were neutralized. But there were a few opponents she couldn't help but have more specific sentiments about.

Back in the day, she'd almost enjoyed fighting the HIVE, Jinx and her being fairly evenly matched for strength and abilities. Kyd Wykkyd was sly and Billy Numerous required a vast energetic exertion, so fighting them was always educational in strategic terms. Dr. Light made her feel like a monster, even though only she was able to sense his unease at her these days, and Mumbo's wanton use of magic offended her.

Adonis, on the other hand-

"Hey pretty girl, missed me while I was away?" His new neon green battlesuit came with some sort of powerful magnetic pulse ray that effectively batted both Cyborg and Starfire away like flies, and he strode towards her smiling winsomely.

_Let's see how pretty I look in another minute._ "Azarath Metrion _Zinthos_".

Adonis had become idiotically convinced that their brief encounters while he disturbed the peace of Jump City were some form of unresolved romantic tension between him and her, of all people. Too smalltime for a bail his millionaire guardian couldn't pay, too annoying to let ordinary law enforcement have at him on their own, Adonis was her very own Thing that would Not Leave.

She ground her teeth as two lampposts became pliant under her powers and tightened them around the battlesuit carefully. The neural interface between Adonis and his high tech metallic crawdad was tricky: while it made him more vulnerable, it also meant the suit had to be destroyed in a certain way, or risk seriously injuring its occupant. The line between incapacitating him and killing him was thin and often meant the fight would drag on while said line was figured out (an endlessly annoying, frustrating, utter waste of a while).

The posts creaked ominously and Raven knew she had used too little pressure. Adonis broke out of the cluster she was attempting to form around him and used the momentary distraction caused by the flying debris to pounce, pressing his hands around her arms so that she'd have to risk hurting them both to use her powers. "Aww, your lips look so lonely. Would they like to meet mine?"

Why couldn't unobtrusive, practically mute Kyd Wykkyd be the one crushing on her? "I figure you don't hear this much, but no." Adonis snickered like she'd said something outrageously witty, tightened his hold on her and puckered his lips. He hadn't moved another muscle before a hairy green arm was around his neck and an equally hairy hand face-palmed him. Raven felt the arms loosen a fraction, which was all she needed, slipped neatly from his grasp and let the green gorilla on his back pound at his circuitry. Two electrically charged birdarangs hit his chest not a full minute later, overcharging the suit into off mode, and that was thankfully that.

The gorilla morphed back into Beast Boy as it reached her side, smiling. "Y'know, once you figure out how to exploit that creepy obsession he has with you, this dude's no fun at all."

"Glad to be useful." She deadpanned in response. Post-case banter between them was familiar territory, and she almost reveled in it.

His suit ruined, the wiry young man was extracted from the heap, given basic medical care (which just meant seeing to a few small scratches and bruising) and read his Miranda rights for what had to be the millionth time. He'd be out too soon, but Raven could count on at least a month or two's breather. It was standard procedure from there: Robin would give statements, she and Star would do basic cleanup so the District didn't have to send in cranes and lifts, and Beast Boy and Cyborg covered the police force's backs in case their suspect tried to make a break for it, particularly since they would usually send a very small pickup team when Adonis was concerned.

Basic cleanup took no time at all, both of the Titans flanking the police car were fair game for conversation as far as Star was concerned, and the lot had fallen on Cyborg by simple chance. Joining them on the left would leave the other flank to Beast Boy alone, a tactical mistake, so Raven took right as well. She had to.

Beast Boy, who was fiddling with his wrists, had smiled at her in that exaggerated way he sometimes did to acknowledge her, and Raven acknowledged back with a nod. Familiar territory, indeed.

He continued to fiddle with his hands, and Raven noticed he'd wince every time he tried to bend the right hand at the wrist. "Your hand."

"Yeah, think I pulled something when I tried to force the cables out."

Raven said nothing, just summoned the healing magic and held her hand out for the injured limb, which had Beast Boy complying with a relieved sigh (_of course he'd comply, why wouldn't he, whatever is wrong between us doesn't mean he thinks I'm a leper_). She pressed her palm gently below his own, letting the flowing energy find the rent tendons and knit them back together.

And then, a snarl had everyone tensing in anticipation.

Adonis rarely gave them the time of day once he was being loaded up, though sometimes he'd find it in him to flirt with Raven one last time or tell whoever was still listening that they hadn't seen the last of him, but never had he attempted to continue fighting once his suit had been disposed of. This time, however, he was putting up the best struggle his wiry frame could, and his emotions, when probed, were a potent burst of rage with a streak of scalding possessiveness.

"Yo string bean, hands off my girl."

She'd navigated his atrocious pick-up lines only to have to endure an episode of petty jealousy, quite in line with Adonis' absurd machismo. Of course. Idly, Raven concluded that the universe had it out for her lately.

Beast Boy regarded him skeptically "Hate to break it this way, but a little bird told me she might just not be that into you. Get it? Birds?" She raised an eyebrow at him, because it was what she did in the face of his weak humor, but didn't take her eyes off Adonis too long.

"Hardy har, B." Raven glanced at Cyborg, who was smiling tensely, as was Starfire. He was holding his cannon at the ready where he'd held his wrists loose before, and Star's spine had shot ramrod straight. They were all weathered heroes, and knew that even a minute's unwatchfulness might turn an easy assignment into a tragedy, particularly when it came to deceitful sorts, enemies with unknown cards up their sleeves, and cretins.

The case in point stopped writhing, arms falling limp, but his frown didn't relax even as his escorts wisely cut regular procedures short and attempted to handcuff him. Raven noticed, now somewhat worried, that the cop holding the left arm was just barely stronger than Adonis was. They snapped one cuff on him and he complied quietly for all of two seconds before digging his heels rebelliously into the asphalt again. "And that means she's into you instead? Word around the locker rooms is girls don't dig ya unless they have an agenda."

Raven felt the tendon under her thumb tense as the hand balled into a fist. Belatedly, she realized she'd never let go of Beast Boy's wrist, even though she was too distracted to muster the healing energies. "You are being ungracious in your defeat, a trait typical to cowards." Starfire was not poised for attack, but her smile had been replaced by a stony glare.

If Adonis had a single sensible bone in his body, he'd have hustled it to the van and shut up, but of course, he didn't. In fact, he only seemed suddenly alight with glee as he realized what had pushed Beast Boy's buttons, the joy of an easy win making him plow forward happily into disaster. He hadn't managed to break loose, but suddenly Left Escort's hand slipped, the handcuff that had yet to be locked slid off, and Adonis lunged, as far as Right Escort's hold allowed, towards Beast Boy. "Right, you had like this huge crush on the blonde girl! The one who wrecked the city two summers ago! Or was it five…anyway, Le Blanc says she took you out for a walk the day that Slade guy hit the tower, to weaken defenses, and you thought it was a date." He snickered, and Raven thought she could hear the partially healed tendon slowly rend itself again from the tension. "Anyway, back off, would ya? You weren't good enough for Jailbait, you're not good enough for my girl-"

Too far, by half.

"Azarath Metrion _Zinthos_." Adonis' legs, arms and torso were encased in black, slipping from his escort's hold altogether, and Raven saw her own hand trace a figure in the air that had him squatting in an uncomfortable looking plié position. "And you are a sorry excuse for a villain too useless to be frozen under Paris, too dumb to take a hint and far too idiotic to date even the Brain's backup fluid container." Another tendril of black snaked across his lips and forced them shut. "Now play nice, and get in the car." With wide eyes, Adonis pirouetted ridiculously towards the waiting van. She made him walk in with his feet still en pointe, too.

If anyone on the pickup squad thought she'd used force excessively, they didn't say it to her face. Left Escort radiated hilarity, though, so maybe she'd been right on point. She turned her back on the van door sliding shut on one slack-jawed face and towards the team again. Cyborg radiated a pleased surprise, a returning Robin was caught between bewilderment and mild disapproval, Star bombarded her with righteous fury and vindication, and Beast Boy alternated rapidly between grateful and shocked.

She sought out Beast Boy's eyes as she strode past him, hood flying up. "Adonis is always out of line. But that was excessive." She didn't break stride as they exchanged lingering glances, bound for the T Car. The others stood shell-shocked for another minute before following suit.

* * *

It was once more nighttime when the familiar emotional cloud strode down her hallway. This time, however, he stopped at her door. He didn't knock, simply standing before her closed door, a thread of contemplativeness coming up briefly amidst the mass of his other, distinctly darker emotions. He probably knew she was awake.

Raven figured he was preparing to knock. He didn't. She heard him shift, leaning his weight against the metal, searching for the invisible seam near the doorframe.

"Hey, Rae...thank you. For today."

Unexpectedly he pulsed, as if his feelings were flowing out to the tune of his beating heart, and an emotion that felt hot and stinging like shame but cold as fear and crushing as defeat came towards her like a frightened bat, one that had Raven shuffling for balance on her bed even as Beast Boy trudged away. It disturbed her with its unfamiliarity for a moment before she placed the coldness in it, remembering their very first encounter with Adonis.

Years ago, in the chemical lab, Beast Boy had felt like this. She recalled his anger. How he'd chafed under his mocking superiority. How he'd felt a singular high at pounding Adonis to the ground. How he'd nearly lost himself to terror once he'd realized how similar they were when he let himself succumb to the Beast, no better than his opponent.

Then, as now, it seemed Adonis had plucked the fiber of his being that wanted to be recognized as a man.

Safe behind the walls of her room and her bookcases and curtains, Raven could afford the luxury of letting her face fall. She was at a complete loss. She could understand his fear at the more primal side of himself and his fear at not being good enough as a person or a Titan; even his mourning over Terra was familiar since her own for Malchior. But the part of Beast Boy that reared its head every once in a while, the part that was male and yearned and wanted for things like more equal footing with Robin was as bewildering to Raven as Starfire's highly emotional culture could be. It was a part run through with those same insecurities, but like white light through a prism, it took on too many different colors for her to discern.

And Beast Boy knew it. All of them knew how attuned Raven was to their emotions, and none of them, least of all him, would have dared to come within seven leages of a fully rested Raven with sentiments burning this bright. Not unless they didn't know how to hide them from her (impossible, after spending his formative years under a man who could read minds), or wanted her help.

Or they no longer cared enough to hide.

She bent her head. The stalemate was broken, but nobody had won.


	3. To Make the Heart Run Over

Raven didn't see it coming.

It crept up on her by degrees, slow and inexorable. Later, she'd find small signs, contextual clues, even moments where it seemed like the world was bent on screaming at her to look out, to look sharp.

Raven should have seen it coming. But she didn't.

* * *

She'd been sitting on the common room couch, sipping a chamomile tea blend and looking out at the seashore. Three torturous nights of wallowing uselessness had begun robbing Raven some of her peace, but no solution had presented itself. No green angsting teenagers had approached her door at night, either. She figured he'd go back to one form of avoidance or another after what had happened.

She was lost in these thoughts when Robin discretely announced his presence behind her. She turned her head a fraction and nodded. "Robin."

"Raven." He came around to sit to her left, holding a filing folder by its top corners. A folder with a very conspicuous set of logos on its lid.

"The JLA _and_ the Doom Patrol?"

"And the Titans." He pointed to the embellished capital T near the center.

Raven raised an eyebrow, intrigued. Tandem work wasn't unusual, particularly with Robin still maintaining communication and a cordial working relationship with many Justice League members from his days as Batman's collaborator, but these were three separate organizations with distinctly different views of _everything_, from uniform protocol to morals, working together and officially, no less. Things like that didn't happen unless there was –

"Is everything alright beneath Paris?"

"It is, but that's exactly what this is all about." Robin tapped the folder for emphasis. "The Brotherhood of Evil fell under our jurisdiction when they targeted and systematically attacked the Titans as an organization, more so because we didn't request any involvement when we did take them down. The Titans don't have an office in charge of legal affairs though, so processing these guys has been…tricky. The JLA was called in to help, and they could technically process them without us, but they can't exclude us without setting precedents they could regret in the future."

_To your profound relief_, Raven thought. She couldn't imagine anything more sensitive to Robin than losing control of a case he considered his own. Robin caught on to her amusement and shrugged, his half-smile clearly responding_ I'm neurotic and I won't apologize for it_.

"Anyway, this is what's going on. Having several platoons of wanted criminals frozen in one place is both against international criminal law and dangerous, mainly because just one enterprising desperado is all it could take for a mass breakout. The Brain will probably remain frozen for a while, 'minor threats' like Gizmo and the rest of the HIVE Five are getting unfrozen to be legally prosecuted…there's still a lot of debating to do. The Doom Patrol was brought on for consultation, but they're being a little difficult."

"You mean Mento's being difficult."

Robin smirked "No. I actually mean Mento's being a pain in the ass." He pressed two fingers to his temple, as if warding off a headache. "I want to bring in Beast Boy as one of our own consultants."

Raven blinked. "Good."

"I know, he probably has enough on his plate – wait, did you just agree?"

"Yes. I agreed." She took a long sip of her tea. The chamomile blend was for times of stress, both due to its medicinal traits and its symbolic representation: the plant's small white flowers stood for patience. "Beast Boy is the only person who can either get through to Mento, or tell you how to get through to him. He also knows the Brotherhood. He can't go into classified Doom Patrol information, but he can give you insights. Bring him in."

Robin blinked a little bemusedly at her. "OK. I guess…thank you for supporting the decision Raven. It's just, these past few days…" He settled back into the couch. "I get the feeling that something's a little off with him. Since the shapeshifter. I didn't want to make it into an obligation he couldn't refuse, when he wants to focus on…." _On healing from Terra_, he meant.

Being privy to a fraction of what he was actually feeling, Raven knew that Beast Boy'd probably take the exclusion on something his old team (his entire old life) was involved with as a sign that Robin still didn't think he was up to more cerebral work. But if she could finish assuring Robin that he was doing the right thing…

A flicker of something like relief trembled in her chest, small and bright as a candle's flame.

"He can do it."

"I know he can. If I've learned anything this past year, it's that all of you are perfectly capable as heroes and leaders. But I've also learned to remember to take the, ah, finer things, into account."

Feelings. He no longer wanted to unknowingly hurt their feelings. Had Cyborg been there, he'd have pinched his cheek and cooed about Robbie being all grown up, and while she was far less demonstrative, Raven could sincerely echo the sentiment. She settled for a shrewd look, then downed the rest of the tea and eased her back away from the couch to stand.

"He's handling it, whatever it is. Bring him in." A beat. "Don't ask him first. Tell him you need his help. Then ask." Any other order of ideas, and he'd risk making Beast Boy think he was being brought onboard because Robin had somehow noticed he was down and wanted to cheer him up. A consolation assignment. "How many other Titans are involved?"

"Other than me? Three more. Bumblebee. Jinx. Red Star."

Raven nodded. Two designated leaders and one formerly upstanding militia man.

"Tell him that."

"I will. Thank you, Raven." He smiled at her thankfully as she reached the sink to clean her cup. She nodded back, then looked down at her teacup. A hiss of hydraulic doors later, she was alone again.

Raven let the water fill the cup, herbal residue swirling inside. She watched as the water reached its brim, forming a barely perceptible dome. She shut off the water, but a few small drops escaped the faucet, landing with inaudible plops and making the cup overflow.

* * *

She was reaching the mouth of one of the corridors several days later, past the open door of the evidence room, when she caught a snatch of conversation.

"- and that's about it. We need you, Beast Boy."

Raven's empathic senses were converging on the scene beyond the door almost before she could rationalize.

She felt the moment of incredulity. Then the warm, enveloping swell of sheer joy. A tug of acceptance. A glow of gratitude.

"Yeah. I mean yes. I'll be glad to help out."

Two heavy steps told her Robin had stepped forward. She'd bet anything he was shaking Beast Boy's hand.

"Thank you, Beast Boy." There were a few second of silence, then "I mean it. Thank you. This'll only get more complicated if we can't count on you." And then warm, sweeping relief.

A portal opened beneath her feet. She teleported herself the rest of the way to her room, unwilling to intrude on the moment any further. As she snapped off her cloak and took a seat on the edge of the bed, she realized that the lingering warmth in her chest was equal parts the memory of Beast Boy's joy, and her own vast, peaceful sense of accomplishment.

For the first time in weeks, no cloud of malcontent stalked the tower that night.

* * *

The feeling of relief hadn't abandoned Raven by next morning. She was in high spirits come breakfast, which didn't translate into any particular reaction or overt talkativeness, just a shade more gentleness in her manner, like how she accepted an additional spoonful of the pink-and-green something or other on Starfire's dish before telling her she didn't want one for herself, thank you.

Raven could tell she was particularly well disposed towards Beast Boy, but it was normal after seeing him lost in the maelstrom he'd stirred up in his own heart. The genuine curve to his smiles and the lightness in his steps brought her relief over and over, and while she kept her empathic senses dormant, she could tell his mood echoed hers.

She offered to take dish duty, which wasn't uncommon given that it was the only thing she could be trusted to do in the kitchen, and was carefully scraping inexplicably blue somethings from the bowl Star had used for cooking when Beast Boy's shout startled her.

"Dudes, we haven't gone for pizza in ages! Who's up for some tonight?"

"We have not shared the pizza pie since our triumphant return! I second the motion!"

"Sounds good to me."

"Woohoo! Double meat special, have I missed _you_!"

Raven went back to battling the blue substance. "Sure, that'll be fun." She deadpanned, sticking an unwashed spoon beneath a large patch of it and pushing until she felt it give, before putting in under the running water for just a few seconds. She felt more than saw eyes on her and looked up across the room to two green ones.

Beast Boy's expression was transparent. _Thank you_.

Robin must have told him she'd approved.

Her distinctly mellow disposition, the memory of his last thank you (broken and warped, slipping through her door along with his hurt), and the boisterous familiarity of the common room all combined and she gave him a small smile. His own grew significantly in response, and something in Raven felt lighter.

She didn't realize the bowl she'd meant to rinse quickly was running over until her hand caught the excess.

* * *

"Alright, so are we gonna have the meat special or are we gonna have the meat special?"

"Dude, really?"

"C'mon grass stain, we agreed to go half and half!"

"But your stupid meat special always ruins the middle slices! And I'm not forgetting that one time sausage bits popped up on _my_ side."

"The toppings slipped! It happens! You don't see me raising hell every time one of your soggy mushrooms slips under a cut of _my_ pepperoni, do ya?"

"Could we not ask for a lager pizza to make up to friend Beast Boy for the slices invaded by the meat?"

"That's actually a great idea Star. So it'll be an extra extra large half meat special, half veggie please." Robin liked to head off arguments like that when food or general welfare were concerned: agree to the first half viable solution and execute it before the Allies and the Central Powers had a chance to really get going.

But even those arguments were less lengthy and moronic these days. It was one more of those little things that reminded Raven that several years had indeed gone by since they'd met, like how Robin had stopped getting defensive when someone asked about his hard-to-label relationship with Star, or how Cyborg could be prevailed upon to use protein substitutes in meals a few times a week. Even though she prided herself on her self-awareness, she sometimes found her memories of life on Azarath would take on the consistency of dreams in the face of her solid now with the Titans, like being the doomed demon child of Arella Roth was a whole other lifetime.

Raven would have lost herself in her musings until the pizza arrived, had a small orange hand not poked her knee discretely under the table. Star glanced at Robin and Cyborg, absorbed in discussing the online college courses the former was thinking of enrolling in, put out at being so thoroughly ignored, but soon turned on her with a scintillating smile.

"Friend Raven, would you be so kind as to assist Beast Boy in the fetching of mustard? I believe he is being intimidated by that table of girls over there." Surely enough, a table of very blonde young women near the staircase who'd been rather obviously eyeballing all three of the menfolk since they arrived were tittering madly at Beast Boy, who'd reached the service counter on the other side of them. The mustard was already in his hand, but he was glancing at the agitated table with something like mistrust on his face.

Raven frowned. "He looks uncomfortable."

"Indeed, Friend Beast Boy should have done the posturing and flirting, or at least the smirking as he passed, which he did not."

He wasn't a bona fide flirt like Red X, who'd try a few lines with anything vaguely female shaped, but ignoring a perfect opportunity for attention from a clearly adoring crowd was definitely out of character.

Looking at him a little more closely, Raven could see a slight downward slope to his shoulders. The crowded pizzeria was not a comfortable place to let her mental barriers down and let in the emotions of others, but Beast Boy's body language spoke plainly enough.

One of the giggly girls pointed, not very discrete, and Beast Boy visibly deflated.

Raven needed no more convincing. She slipped from her seat soundlessly and made her way over to the service area and her inexplicably cowed teammate.

Beast Boy observed her arrival just a little more warily than The Table of Blondes. "Hi Rae."

"Hi. Thinking of coming back to the table any time this century?"

"Yeah, I was just…yeah." He flapped his unoccupied hand uselessly.

"They probably don't bite, you know."

"Uh, yeah."

"Anything to say other than another 'yeah'?"

"Uh..." He had the decency to blush.

It could have been any number of things, Raven decided. None of the girls resembled Terra even remotely, but he'd been sensitive enough about reminders of her of late. With his natural humorous defenses worn down, he probably didn't know what to do or say about the sudden (rather intrusive) female attention; Robin's vote of confidence, and hers, were not going to fix Beast Boy overnight. No, this was something he'd have to work through himself, at his own pace.

But discomfort at the gaze of others was something Raven could relate to, perhaps a little too well.

She glanced at their table. The pizza had arrived, and a ravenous Cyborg was already grasping the first piece. Star was engrossed with something Robin was telling her about, happy at once more being entitled to a bit of his attention.

With both hands held below the public's line of sight for discretion, Raven carefully enveloped the table with her powers, opening a sizable portal on the floor beneath. As the table sank a few centimeters, three bewildered pairs of eyes snapped up, probably looking for her, and Cyborg let out a startled "What the-!", but the table, with its Titans, pizza, chairs and parasol was sent smoothly through the floor before anyone noticed.

"Let's go back, OK?" Raven thought little of nudging Beast Boy's shoulder as she turned around, towards the interior dining area and away from the terrace and the blondes.

"But our table's out there…"

"Nope." Walking briskly, they crossed the dining area and Raven once more nudged him, off towards the bathroom halls.

"Okay, I know I'm a little bit of a clunk sometimes, but I'm totally sure we did _not _take a table in the guy's washroom."

"You're right, we didn't." She reached out to grasp his free arm lightly above the elbow and they were marching through the portal she materialized into the air directly in front of them before he could say another word.

When the darkness receded, they were on the pizza parlor roof. It was cleaner than she'd expected it to be, and a pleasant breeze that'd otherwise be lost amidst the taller buildings ran through. She wondered if anyone had thought of opening another dining area up here.

Cyborg was standing by the table now, not even bothering to hide his surprise. "Is it too much to hope you'll explain the sudden relocation, Raven?" He didn't look amused "Last time I vanished from a table, I popped back up in another dimension." He looked at the pizza slice in his hand, no worse for wear after teleporting, but she could hear the hum of his scanner for a minute before he allowed himself another bite of it.

"While I am surprised, I commend Raven's choice of location. It is breezy and pleasant." Starfire saw the mustard in Beast Boy's hands and plucked it out with a joyous grin, proceeding to spray her own slice liberally without a care in the world "Ah, the mustard at last. Thank you, friend Beast Boy." She smiled at him gratefully. Beast Boy remained shell-shocked, his hand frozen as if he still held the mustard in it, then shook his head free of the surprise and gave Star two thumbs up.

Robin simply crossed his arms at Raven.

She didn't miss a beat. "Keeping my empathy dormant takes a lot of energy, sometimes." Which wasn't exactly a lie. Relaxing her psychic guard each night was a vast relief, and keeping it up _was _taxing...when she was exceptionally spent after a fight. "There were too many people. I wouldn't have been able to cross back to the table without getting pummeled psychically." She gestured around. "I didn't want to leave. This seemed a nice alternative."

Robin's arms remained crossed.

"I'll return the table when we're done."

The corners of his mouth turned down.

"I'll…cover the tips."

Robin continued to stare her down for another minute. Then, inexplicably, he looked to Beast Boy, then back to her, and Raven swore she saw his cheekbone rise in mild amusement as he turned away. "That'll be fine. Thank you Raven. And this is actually a nice place. Quiet."

Well, that was close. Cyborg sat back down, Robin turned back to the steaming tray, and Starfire was bathing her second slice in mustard.

As one, she and Beast Boy moved towards the table. "All right! Sweet, cheesy, veggieful delight!" He raced forward, overtaking her and settling into his chair. Raven slid into her own place, beside Star and across from him.

She watched him polish off a slice in record time, making vaguely canine sounds of delight afterwards that she found more amusing than most of his jokes. Her low chuckle went undetected by most ears, but of course, Beast Boy did not have common ears.

He looked up, meeting her eyes in wonder. Raven braced herself for the inevitable pointing and announcing….

…but he didn't. His eyes lit up further, happy and inexplicably soft. There wasn't another thank you in his eyes: there was gratitude, certainly, but this time he was commending her, like they'd just partnered up for a particularly succesful prank. Complicity.

Raven felt a powerful wave of adoration that made her click her boots together under the table in surprise. She shifted, bewildered. She'd have to be more careful about letting her empathic senses loose-

Beast Boy's eyes dropped from hers and back onto the pizza. The adoration grew. Around her, no other feelings were evident.

Over the course of the incident, she had never been using her empathy at all.

* * *

Raven should have noticed, the increase in her awareness towards him, the unusual transcendence his emotions had on her. She cared for all her friends, more than she'd find it in her to elaborate, but never had their mere _existence_ been capable of monopolizing her attention so.

But she didn't. The emotion had grown, had changed, and was coming alight with something warm and enveloping.

And Raven had never felt more lost.


	4. Overtures of War

_I found it hard to decide the right pitch of Raven's feelings at this early stage. The end result is...satisfactory, I think. Small reference to the staggeringly wonderful fic 'Breaker' by Shire Conspire added to the mix._

* * *

_8 o'clock. 9 o'clock. _

Raven wondered if it might not have been a mishap with her powers.

_10 o'clock. 11 o'clock._

She wondered if it might not be a brief misunderstanding of other, more platonic emotions.

_12 o'clock. 1 o'clock._

It was time to cave. She dove into Nevermore with no precise plan of action in mind, no location of appearance clear in her intentions. She woke in a corner of Happy's colorful dreamscape to a lavender-cloaked emoticlone she had never seen before offering her a hand up.

"Who are you?" She cringed slightly at how weak her voice sounded.

"You know."

"No, I don't."

"Let me help you up."

"No." Irrationally, Raven didn't want to be touched. Not by whatever part of her soul that one emoticlone stood for.

Lavender Raven exhaled, long and slow. She straightened, apparently conceding, and made as if to sit, only to have real Raven nearly fall flat on her back in her efforts to escape contact. The emoticlone looked on as Raven tried to right herself with some dignity, mouth curved downward and hands up in a strangely defensive gesture. Then she sighed again.

"You know who I am. I wouldn't be able to manifest otherwise. You aren't even denying me. Just…avoiding me. " And she gave Raven a small, sympathetic smile. "It isn't time, then. I'll…be around." She used few words, like Raven herself did, but they were suffused in a gentleness Raven was sure lacked in her own speech. Lavender Raven gathered her cloak in one hand, turned to the left like a ballerina building momentum and dissolved into thin air. Raven sat amidst the pink and purple for a long time.

By three o'clock, Raven lay spread-eagled on her bed, head heavy, wondering about the minute cracks in her ceiling, about the way the moonlight slanted through her curtains. She thought about the seeming indolence of the world when something cataclysmic happened in the emotional plane, how the night wore on, silent and serene even as her own heart was caught in a raging storm.

She though, of all things, of how this was a lot like taking a step to realize you'd broken an ankle. You'd lay all your weight on it for all of a second before angry bursts of pain shot up through the leg and you'd fall, gasping, hurting and bewildered. Because the realization did bring pain.

Tread marks on her carpet.  
Light nail scores on her arms like half moons where she clutched them.

She had felt respect for Azar, a fearful sort of attachment to her mother, a fierce affection for Robin, Cyborg and Star, and a giddy infatuation for Malchior. The ambiguous pressure that curled around heart when she thought of Beast Boy, however…

Fear, joy, expectation and despair. Like surfacing for air after being near drowning.

She was in uncharted territory.

* * *

Raven had learned well enough what denial of her emotions caused on the fabric of reality when she'd brought a monster from a horror movie to life. Which was how, by six o'clock she'd resolved not to avoid company in general or Beast Boy in particular (not more than she regularly did, at least), and to let herself feel.

They were part of a team. They battled criminals that would try her patience and demand that she use her powers to great effect. Avoidance would breed still more strife in her and unbalance the team, she might grow unused to Beast Boy's presence and become unstable when their paths did cross. And, if she allowed herself a second of naked honesty, she knew not seeing him would do little to quell her quiet longings to do so.

Suppressing desire didn't weaken the longing. It gave it strength. So when her alarm clock rang at seven, she stopped it in the middle of the first ringing and went about her morning routine.

She felt Robin's calm psyche as he headed for training room, Star's joy at the morning bursting to life not fifteen minutes later, and forcibly made her powers dormant. She idled in her room, trying to read, trying to meditate, until finally succumbing to hunger by nine.

Everyone was in the common room when the pneumatic door opened.

Star was carefully spooning a repeat of her blue gunk dish into Silkie's eager mouth, Robin had turned away from the main computer to stare at her glowing face, Cyborg was momentarily absent…

…and there was Beast Boy, devouring his tofu scrambled eggs without a care in the world. But of course, he had to be the first to notice her. "Morning Rae!" then he thought back on what he'd said and smiled at the silly double entendre. Raven could almost hear his thoughts, knowing he'd be mentally filing the weak joke for later use. She shook her head, just barely catching her own smile before it broke her careful façade.

She'd get some toast and whatever Cyborg might have left for her on the stove, read her book on the couch like she did every other day, and everything would be alright.

* * *

"Yo BB, the last installment of Crash Bandit Kart, just in!"

Raven's head didn't move, her eyes continued to wander down the words, the words were consigned to her memory all the same. But the world around her stopped being a distant shuffle of white noise.

"Cool! So unless the alarm- nah, never mind, not gonna jinx it, how about I kick your ass around for a bit?"

"What!? You wish, scrawny butt."

"Hey!"

They'd have to come to the couch, of course. Raven tried hard not to care when Beast Boy chose the side closest to her. She had to put in a little more effort when he sprawled onto the couch, one thigh coming to rest beside her own, bare in her leotard, and remembered just in time that this behavior merited a retort before shuffling away.

"Yes, please do invade my space, Beast Boy."

"Yeah, sorry Rae. But this seat? Best angle when playing first person." He pointed to the couch cushion for emphasis.

"You'd know, of course." His smiling eyes felt unexpectedly hard to meet, so she looked at his hands instead, confused. She mused idly about how Beast Boy rarely, if ever, took off his gloves, then realized she was staring and snapped her attention back to her reading.

They played several rounds as she read her book on the sidelines, sometimes even managing to get genuinely annoyed at the noise. But then he'd win and do his idiotic victory dance, and she'd feel her eyes pause for a second in her book, the noise aggravating yet endearing. She wanted to roll her eyes and mutter something sarcastic, to which he'd quip back and start an argument, or maybe make light of it and start a conversation.

Star had even paused on her way out to let Raven know she'd be welcome to join in on her morning flight. She'd refused. Because she wanted to read her book there. She wanted to stay. She wondered if screaming would feel as purging as her mind suggested it would.

She clutched her book a little harder instead.

A hairline fracture promptly appeared across the rim of the mug Robin was raising to his lips in the kitchen area, where he always went to prepare himself his first coffee once Star had left.

"Something wrong, Raven?" He glanced at her, then examined the broken ceramic, put out. Probably wondering if it would keep together if he ventured a drink.

"Yeah. Just haven't been sleeping well." A half truth, since she'd only been disturbed from her sleep the night before. Insomnia did make it harder not to succumb to strong emotions.

"Maybe you should go on to your room and meditate?"

"Maybe." Deflection. She was too high strung at the moment to concentrate.

"Tea?"

"Why not?" She put her book down on the couch cushion and vaulted over its back, headed towards the cupboard that housed her tea blends. Valerian for her overenergized brain, a dash of lemon balm for peace. She dusted the herbs into the kettle, waited as it came to boiling point -

"Eurgh, what stinks? It's like the lining of a sweaty tennis shoe. A Cinderblock-sized one." Beast Boy was looking at her and Robin, nose wrinkled and wearing an expression of outrage so deep it was almost comical.

"It's valerian root, kid." Cyborg didn't even pause in the act of activating the turbo of his animated vehicle as he answered. "Not exactly Chanel number five, and it tastes a little bitter, but it's great for insomnia. And anxiety."

Beast Boy continued glaring at the kitchen like its occupants had offended all of his ancestors. "So you have to actually drink the stuff too?" He shuddered.

"I wouldn't have to drink this stuff if some of us learned to be seen and not heard."

"Nice try Rae, but in all the years I've known you, you've never stunk up the kitchen like that." He smirked, then seemed to take another whiff of the steeping valerian and cringed. "Trust me, I'd remember _that_."

"Yes, I suppose something had to stick eventually."

"Hey, that was…actually, that was lame Rae." His expression lost its pointed, mocking edge. "Real bad night?" He might have been remembering his own sleepless wanderings.

"I dreamed of you, actually." _Wait for it, wait for it_… "I woke up screaming for help."

"Whoa, that intense?" He raised an eyebrow, slinging his arm over the back of the couch in what he must have thought was a suave, inviting way. Their teasing didn't often venture into this territory, but even as Raven identified it as a joke, a hint of warmth was flooding her cheeks. She was loathe to admit it, but she had nothing to toss back.

"BOOYAH!" The screen flashed with fireworks and virtual confetti as Cyborg's kart made it over the finish line, Beast Boy swiveled around in open-mouthed dismay, and Raven could breathe again. "And once again, widdle Garfie shall dine on the fine cuisine of Chez Cyborg, because you just got _served_! Woohoo!"

"We're so gonna have some serious issues if you ever call me that again."

"Is there a radio on in here, or is that the griping of Garfie I hear?"

"_Dude, that is it!_"

Raven turned her back on the spectacle for a moment to share an understanding glance with Robin. He was tipping his coffee into another mug, grinning tolerantly. "And then they ask why we drink." He quipped, even though his drink was perfectly free of alcohol and all of them knew it.

Robin had no idea how right he was. The sheer irony brought a laugh from Raven, and a mildly shocked tilt of the head from their leader. Another race was starting on the large screen, and Raven decided she'd exposed herself enough for the present time, summoning her book from the couch seat and gathering both it and her cup to go find a quieter place to read.

She felt less and less inclined to leave with each step, and had to coax herself through the common room door.

* * *

_I am the undisturbed surface of a deep, dark lake._

_Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos. Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos._

_The guileless look in his eyes. The way his smile curves too deeply, honest in its artlessness._

Raven sighed and dropped out of her meditative hovering. She hauled herself off the bed, ignoring the book she'd carried about all morning and picked a tome from the shelf that housed her poetry with her powers, choosing at random. It was Shakespeare, and she wasn't often in the mood for him, but he was appreciated.

She opened it, the firm spine cracking from lack of use, and rifled through line upon line until a particular page caught her attention.

_My love is as a fever, longing still  
For that which longer nurseth the disease_

The strength drained out of her legs and she dropped heavily back onto the mattress, caught in a whirlwind. Identification. Despair. And somewhere underneath her bewilderment and mild horror, there was exhilaration.

Affection. Lavender Raven, she decided, would be called Affection.

She felt cold with fear and weak with disappointment at the thought, warm with animation, oddly giddy with something like catharsis. Letting herself feel.

Yes, she was feverish.


	5. Across the Rubicon

_I apologize, because this wait was longer than I planned. The very end of this chapter has been written for several weeks now - but I had to get the story there, and it is crucial. I couldn't rush things at this point._

* * *

The training room. The common room. The kitchen.

Her books. Her designated teacup. Her seat on the couch.

Raven executed a mental checklist as she walked down to the training field, and not for the first time, she wondered if she had somehow stepped into a mirror-like alternate dimension, where everything looked deceptively the same.

This wasn't because of any alteration in Raven's routine. She broke the mobility spells Mumbo cast on a few tall buildings to make them attack, helped Cyborg with a minute alteration to the T-sub, and allowed Starfire to plait her increasingly long hair. She caved to Robin's insistence and helped him test a new mind-blocking technique (he failed). And of course, she argued with Beast Boy.

But as quotidian as everything was, it often felt as if someone had made one minute, crucial modification, like changing the soundtrack of a scene in a movie.

One of these changes colored every meal they shared. Even when multiple events in Jump City had them separated for the length of the day or Robin and Beast Boy had to be away filling in their pivotal roles as leaders of the Legal Process of the Century (or so the papers billed it), the Titans would eat, all together, at least once a day.

And every time, Raven's treacherous mind would gently remind her that it was a singular opportunity to capture Beast Boy's attention.

It was often the one moment they got to share per day, and it was all she could do not to pull her hair in frustration when she caught herself carefully dissecting his answers and her answers and just how many of his expression changed because of her.

It was, Raven thought, fortunate that they were employed full time, that Beast Boy was away several times a week, and that she'd spent her formative years attempting to control her emotions.

Her issue right now was trying to smother them altogether, keep them beneath the surface where she alone was their witness, but she could do it.

Couldn't she?

* * *

Raven woke up in a slightly sullen mood not two days after her brave statement, and couldn't remember why, until she recalled two absences at dinner the night before.

She'd looked pointedly at the seat across from her. "It's awfully quiet here."

Starfire sighed so deeply, it sounded like a sob and the expression of melancholy made Cyborg look up from his meat. "I know our friends are working for the betterment of both the quality of the peace and the legal pathways of the future, but they are missed."

"Well believe you me, I miss Rob and the grass stain as much as either of you." Had his human eye lingered a little on Raven as he mentioned the latter, or was she simply projecting her anxieties? "But of all the things that could be keeping them busy, I'm glad it's one we need. The Titans need to network and grow if they want to survive as an organization. We might never be the JLA, but frankly, that's a good thing. The more we can function without thousands of departments and subdepartments, the more efficient we are at what we're meant to. Crimefighting." He nudged the steak with his fork thoughtfully. "'Sides, with Chlorophil Boy photosynthesizing somewhere else, I take no time at all in the kitchen."

His wink, Raven decided, had been almost certainly aimed at her, and it occupied her mind for the remainder of dinner. So much she almost forgot there would be no Chlorophil Boy until the few seconds before she fell asleep.

The gloom had clearly not vanished overnight. Raven lumbered down the halls, half asleep, in search of tea, her despondency heavy as a veil. She was through the door and halfway down the steps when she felt rather than saw the kitchen was crowded for the early hour it was. There at the table were Beast Boy and Robin discussing things over an open file, over tofueggs and soy bacon. The drowsiness evaporated and her stomach did the strangest thing, like it was performing elaborate cartwheels.

Her mouth was moving before she was even sure what she was going to say. "Tch. And here I thought we'd have _another_ nice, quiet day."

"Pah, you know you'd have missed me." He beamed and patted the seat next to him. Happiness always made him quite brazen, she recalled then. "C'mon. Cy'll be asleep for at least another hour. Help yourself."

"I can say it might not be as awful as you think." Robin even popped a bit of bacon into his mouth to underline the statement. "And, morning, Raven."

She smiled tiny and slid into the seat he'd patted, reminding herself of a slight respectful distance, of looking like she only meant to reach the pan easier. Perhaps she was a bit too quiet, a bit too attentive to certain corny jokes, but if this were a test, she would have passed fairly.

* * *

Her next test happened that afternoon in the open air training field, and it was the most miserable pop quiz she had ever experienced.

It was their second quiet day after Mumbo had set the city's architecture on a rampage, and their second day on the open air training field, but the first had definitely not been this dammnably –

"Man. It is _hot_." And when Cyborg, who possessed a special cooling system to keep the electronics that made up a good percentage of his body running, complained of the heat, it meant they might expect a rain of fire sooner rather than later.

"What he said." Raven was hiding deep within her cloak, preferring the stifling sensation of the cloth to the piquant bite of the sun. She watched as Starfire artfully dodged several lasers out on the track, and from the faint shimmer coming from the mouth of the laser cannons, Raven could tell they'd be sweltering. She took mental note to avoid them by shielding instead of dodging, because curse this heat, even putting one hand on top of the other caused stickiness.

She would have gone on cataloguing small details of the field, even knowing that her own obstacle course would vary, perhaps dramatically, based off Robin's personalized training regime for each of them, when she heard a zipper being pulled down to her left.

The Titans were very close knit. They had seen each other in the grips of madness, the lows of defeat, the very limit of endurance. All of them had seen the others in various states of undress, particularly Cyborg as the medic, and Raven considered herself fairly hardened to sightings of the male physique thanks to both her natural imperturbable nature and her closeness to the menfolk, who'd she'd had to see half naked a good handful of times.

But of course, it had to become one of Those Moments of sudden unfamiliarity.

And it helped not one bit that she knew for a fact that Cyborg didn't really wear any clothes, that Robin was far to her right, and that his uniform had no zippers.

It took very little effort on her part not to turn around and stare, thankfully. But a curiosity she had been experiencing more and more was pricking insistently at her imagination, wondering, picturing…

"Dude, did you see that loop!?" And there was a perfectly oblivious Beast Boy running into her line of sight, his torso free from the top of his uniform, which he'd let fall back and tied by the sleeves about his waist, and Raven's eyes were drawn to his back after a very short battle.

She was a keen observer, and having seen him without a shirt before, didn't feel overwhelmed or surprised. She'd healed strained tendons, helped him reset dislocated shoulders, and in that hearstopping, soulcrushing moment when Terra nearly disposed of them all, had had to coax badly hurt vertebrae back into their place. It had nearly drained her, and she'd exerted herself so much before that she had feared it wouldn't be enough.

There was an unmistakable intimacy in her contact-infused healing, something quiet and peaceful to share after strife and panic. But when she healed she did just that, fix and mend like a mechanic, never pausing to appraise the body parts she was working on as closely as she was admiring the corded muscles moving beneath green skin at the moment.

There was a warmth to her curiosity that had little to do with the infernal temperature, one that quietly suggested she let her hands trace the way the work-hardened shoulder blades curved, find the exact place where his back met his narrow waist, slim but not feminine. No, not feminine at all.

She gulped, feeling herself just a little beyond her control, and hiked up her eyes.

There was a scar, shaped roughly like a starburst, somewhere between the planes of his back, where she'd healed the vertebrae, when she feared for a moment that he might not come back. She'd healed it, put her magic, her soul into it.

_What I touch with my magic becomes a part of me. So, maybe…_

Raven was suddenly once again fully responsive and forcefully turned to look at Robin, who was alternating between watching Star and taking notes. Her face was hot. She was either experiencing heatstroke or blushing very, very badly.

"Hey Raven! Rae!"

_Oh, good, kindly Azar. _"Yeah?" She focused hard on the way Starfire moved in to deactivate the pulse fields she'd been caught in, because his direct gaze still felt inexplicably hard to withstand sometimes, and his partial nakedness was clearly wreaking havoc in her mind today.

"Figure I should try flying forms today? I mean, Robin said I should concentrate on the land animals forms, where I can't be as fast or as agile, but Star's giving me some serious flying envy right now." He was just asking for her honest opinion. Cyborg had moved sometime while she was…occupied…and she could see him busily checking parameters on the obstacle course mainframe. It was natural that he ask her, because she was unoccupied.

Breathing was good, she reminded her lungs.

Cautiously looking to the side, only to find his eyes immediately and flick her head back to the front, Raven cast around for an answer. "You should do whatever you think would be more productive."

She wondered if more stupid words had ever been spoken.

"Yeah, figured you'd say something like that. But I really wanted to beat Star's record. Because you just know _that's_ gonna be a record." He sighed wistfully. Hyperaware as she was, Raven realized that, for the first time since she'd known him, she didn't have to flick her eyes down to meet his.

Surprise made her turn her head around, and sure enough, their shoulders were level. She'd never been that much taller than Beast Boy. But now they were the same height.

A subtle shiver ran up her spine, and she couldn't really articulate the implications, but Beast Boy acquired a connotation of something vague that felt like it should be called maleness to her addled mind.

She slowly moved to gaze at him again, and of course he chose that moment to turn around, catch her wandering eyes and smile his exaggerated, Raven-acknowledging smile.

Raven lost her patience and dragged her hood all the way under her chin.

"Uh…everything alright in there?" There was a hand on her wrist, and even with her leotard's sleeve over it she got the impression of a warm hand, a hand that wasn't pervaded with sweat. Ungloved.

The shiver returned and Raven felt like she wanted to scream.

"I'm fine. It's the glare."

"Oookay? If you're…sure?" If Beast Boy was getting the sense that she was acting weird, then she was being obvious as a kick in the face.

"I'm sure."

"_I wish to claim the new record as mine!"_

"Good job, Starfire."

"That was a good fifteen seconds off the last aerial tactics maneuvers, well done."

"Well, that's my cue." Never had the sound of fabric being readjusted and zippers flying up been such a conflicting sound to Raven, relief and disappointment and a sense of having failed. "You might wanna come out of your shell? To, um see me beat the record?"

Which was a perfectly sensible suggestion only seriously disturbed people would ignore, and so Raven pulled her hood off her face and back onto her head. "There. Good luck."

"Uhuh, thanks Rae." He walked a few paces forward, chanced a slightly worried look back at her, and then ran the rest of the way to the center of the field.

Cyborg stayed to type in the new parameters, Robin thumbed to Beast Boy's section in his notes, and Star shouted encouragements. Nobody saw her facepalm.

_You and I, Lust, are going to have a few words the next time I look into Nevermore._

* * *

Even with her senses permanently on the Garfield Logan channel, Raven had thought she stood a fighting chance. She could reign in her physical impulses, quietly disregard out-of-the blue urges to seek him out, touch him, sometimes just see him. Some perverse part of her wanted to abuse her empathy to learn more, to see what he felt during their repartees, and so she'd rebelled and limited that particular ability to fights and casework. She'd come out the other side of infatuated, worse for wear, but undiscovered, and everything would be alright.

But there was no rest for the wicked, and the wicked, tragically, had no qualms about the limits of emotional young people.

When the alarm sounded later that night, late enough that Raven had considered turning in, she felt a stab of worry. And when Robin stood immobile before the screen for a few seconds too long, she stopped worrying and began to wonder how badly they'd be on return.

The others sensed it too. Robin turned, and nobody spoke nor moved, the moment feeling heavy and silent even with the blaring alarms. Finally Star stepped around their leader and pressed a button. The sirens and flashing lights stopped.

"Slade." Beast Boy was not asking.

"Yes."

* * *

From the moment she stepped on the scene, Raven felt that something was wrong.

It was always the case with Slade, the clenching in her stomach tight, because he was always planning something beyond what was immediately visible. There was no such thing as whimsy or mindless cruelty in Slade's maneuvers.

But the moment she saw Plasmus, Cinderblock and Overload, aided here and there by a small contingent of Slade's robots, wrecking the Murakami High summer dancing event (which was named something ridiculous and alliterative like the Summer Solstice Slam or the Cotillion of Crystals, she couldn't remember), the cold cramp settled and stayed there. It was petty, lacking in meaning.

Which meant that she couldn't discern his motives at all. And that made the situation incalculably dangerous.

It would have been a laughably easy seek-and-disable type of assignment if there hadn't been half a thousand panicked teenagers in dresses and tuxes getting underfoot. Even after managing to evacuate a third of them, the rest seem determined to trail beneath Cinderblock's feet or right in the way of Overload's shots. Their behavior was panicked, but strange in its escape patterns, missing painfully obvious openings and dashing towards danger instead.

She dove between such a group, which Robin had been attempting to lead to safety, and a couple of airborne cars from Plasmus. "They're under the influence of something!" Robin somehow heard her over the insistent banging of metal upon her energy shield and nodded.

"I thought the same!" He lunged forward to tackle a girl in blue and her date, their matching boutonnieres white, as they attempted to flee out from behind Raven's shield. A third car struck the ground they would have been running past haplessly. "Neurotoxins, something that can alter adrenaline levels! They might be experiencing controlled hallucinations too!" _Like I was when I touched his mask_, he was unwilling to add, but Raven understood all the same.

The pounding stopped and Raven dropped her shield. A green giant squid had Plasmus just immobile enough amidst its tentacles. Raven crossed her legs and sent her soul-self into the creature: the sleeping human appeared in a bang of slime.

No time was left for thanks or witty remarks before Beast Boy morphed again ran off to give Cyborg some extra manpower, Robin took off after a suspiciously Slade-shaped shadow, and Raven saw Star almost succeed in depowering Overload's chip with a well-timed starbolt, only to miss her opening when a crowd of hysterical girls rampaged into the midst of things. She headed there.

Together, they managed to shepherd the girls through the vortex Raven opened towards the other side of the police barricade set higher up on the block and finally depower Overload. It was a testament to both Starfire's realism and the team's good sense of tandem work that both of them took off in search of Robin without much conference. It was the regular pattern, to set the grunts on the rest of them to earn a few minutes alone with Robin.

But of course, Slade was nothing if not innovative, and they soon found Robin running to help an almost overwhelmed Cyborg. She only had a minute to trade an alarmed glance with Star (because where _was_ he if not with Robin?) before a piercing shriek reached their ears. "TARA!"

And Raven's instinctual reaction was to locate Beast Boy, because it was him to whom the closest equivalent of that name was most tightly associated.

She was right. On the other side of the gymnasium, a girl who looked astoundingly like Terra hung by the arms from two of the black Sladebots. Her hair was fast escaping its simple, elegant upsweep as she struggled, more panicked than challenging (_unlike Terra_), her black dress smattered with red dust from broken bricks. More bots had appeared, distracting Cyborg and Robin, leaving only Beast Boy, suspiciously Beast Boy, free to attend the crisis.

"Beast Boy, wait!" Raven knew he could hear her, even from this altitude. But she also knew he would ignore her.

With deadly precision, a massive green gorilla leaped over the bots and the girl, snapping back the two mechanical heads as it fell and using its momentum to sever their necks. The girl broke free and ran the clumsy run of a person in high heels as the bared circuitry sputtered, then shorted itself out. Two girls, one of whom had probably been the one to scream her name, attempted to meet her halfway across the baseball field, but a familiar orange-and-black figure quickly intercepted 'Tara'.

Still as a gorilla, Beast Boy charged, and Raven belligerently swooped down into a low arc towards him. She managed to stop him a few scant meters from Slade and his captive, struggling to keep his feet still with her powers even as she confronted their enemy.

"It's not her, Slade." She spoke firmly, softly. "It's not Terra." Raven took care to enunciate the name very carefully, addressing Slade but looking straight at the girl. _Even if you are, act. Act like never before in your life. Not Terra._

"Let her go!" Beast Boy, behind her, had morphed back, but still Raven had trouble keeping his feet magically soldered to the ground. His voice had a tenor she rarely heard, rage and sheer despair, and it made her heart crumple.

But she had a job to do.

"Step away from the girl, Slade. We'll…let you go, if you do."

The single eye peered at her, merriment evident. "Why Raven, when did you become so concerned with such particular civilian lives?" With the hand not holding her thin wrists in a deadlock, Slade flicked casually at the nearly demolished upsweep, sending a couple of straggling hairs into the girl's face. She remained silent, wide-eyed and breathing too shortly to be merely winded and scared.

Raven kept her face blank and her eyes focused.

"Perhaps our friend Tara might not remember, and dear friend Beast Boy probably won't either, but I do. While a mutual friend of ours, very like the lovely Tara, was with you, your powers were so very _volatile_, Raven. Mighty, yes. But…so angry…"

"Which is a moot point, because that's not her."

"Hmmm. True, true…" Slade brought her clasped wrists up, like he was holding a puppet of a girl (_Terra was so brawny but so small, delicate_). "And yet the psyche is so easily fooled." He laughed, a sound from low in his throat. "I'm surprised Raven, at your speedy reaction. The same face, the same eyes…she might not _be_ Terra, but it's Terra you see when you look at her anyway. I wonder…" Her insides felt cold with fear, even as her brave expression held. He suspected something.

But he did nothing. "I hardly mean anything but to remind you that I'm still here. You've been quite…victorious lately. The brave Titans, back from a mass plot to destroy the world. Consider this my homecoming gift to you." Slade lacked a history of using particular people against his targets, even when Starfire and Robin were so painfully obvious to a keen observer, but still something unlike relief coiled her stomach at the words. "Except of course, for you Beast Boy. Never cross swords with carnies and harlots, my boy." And that was all he said before a cryogenic birdarang hit him in the center of the face.

Raven was airborne and racing forward not a second later. She must have released Beast Boy, because the green gorilla was back. She encased what she now presumed was a Sladebot in power at the same time the large animal ripped the girl from his nerveless fingers. Raven sent Robot Slade flying into the external gymnasium wall with enough force to make him come out at the other side.

All sounds of battle had ceased behind them, indicating that the rest of the minor Sladebots had either been destroyed or had beat a speedy retreat. At least Robin was now free enough to react. But all Raven could focus on was the scene unfolding in front of her.

The gorilla was cradling the terrified girl in its massive arms. He shrunk, morphing back into Beast Boy, but held her delicately still. "It's OK." His whisper was soft, full of emotion. Her heart crumpled just a little more.

Starfire materialized, seemingly out of thin air, beside Beast Boy. "She must be swiftly taken to the hops-it-all."

"Hospital."

"Ah, yes." She allowed the correction with gentle eyes. "The partygoers have been affected by a neurotoxin that causes the hallucinations and the fear. They must be treated quickly." She pointed to the edge of the field, where numerous emergency vehicles had begun filing in, several ambulances already rounding up the remaining, frightened highschoolers. That explained the absence of Tara's friends.

But he didn't even acknowledge Star's carefully worded suggestion as he put Tara back on her feet slowly. The girl was breathing easier, peering up at Beast Boy with just a little confusion.

Raven heaved a sigh, the escaped air like a razor in her lungs. "Beast Boy." He looked up at her, his face soft and eyes vulnerable. "Beast Boy. It's OK. Just get her to the EMTs." Her throat closed up quickly after she got the words out, but she was sure her expression was still presentable.

"No." Everyone froze for a moment. Was he about to…"No. You get her over there, Star. I…need to go check out that Sladebot. OK?" Like a gentleman offering his partner a dance, he caught Tara's hand and slowly turned her towards Star. "This is Starfire. She's nice. It'll be fine." Starfire smiled and waved.

"Are you sure? Beast Boy?" She was panting a little, still clearly under the effects of whatever toxin Slade has used.

"Sure I'm sure."

For the first time that evening, Raven noticed a definite sense of sadness around him. Her empathic powers itched for release. Raven clamped down on her wanton desires hard_. This is not the night for heartbreak._

Just as a slightly more at ease Tara was about to change hands, a loud click had them jumping to attention. Through the hole in the gym wall the broken Sladebot shuddered into view, arm raised. A cannon, similar in build to Cyborg's, was pointed at Tara.

So much for their homecoming gift.

Time didn't slow. Raven could remember Star taking flight, the flutter of her hair and how her hands lit up to attack from above, the way Tara swayed as the person about to hold onto her arm vanished, the way Beast Boy's arms moved up to push Tara's shoulders down.

And Raven recalled every step she took, how she realized half a second before the pulse ray struck her that she wouldn't be able to form the shield in time, the way her thoughts strayed to the moment, years ago, when she'd first chosen to stand with Beast Boy rather than save herself. She'd held his arm around her shoulder even as warlord Trogaar advanced. She knew she was too drained, after bringing down the Gordanian mothership, to even think of fighting back, or even attempting a shield. But she refused to let him go.

The emotion had a whole different texture, but her purpose was the same. All she wanted, in that moment, was to be there with him when he fell.

* * *

When she came to, a mighty headache forced her head right back down, her face skyward. A splotch of brown, a larger one of silver, a tiny red light.

"She's awake!" The colors coalesced into the face of Cyborg. "How're you feeling, Raven?" It felt like an order, and Raven didn't like it, but the pounding in her head did away with any objections.

"I feel like I crashed face first against a wall."

"You may as well have." Cyborg carefully put one arm behind her knees, the other behind her back, then lifted her like she weighed nothing more than a small bag of flour. "The grass stain and the hostage are better off. Particularly the girl." His bionic eye hummed, scanning her for damage. "Holy fuck, Rae." He wasn't talking about her physical damage.

"Yeah that was…stupid."

"I wouldn't call it stupid, exactly." He smiled at her in a paternal sort of way. Mildly. Sadly. "No. Stupid just isn't the word for this."

Raven leaned against him, saying nothing.

He _knew_.

* * *

Once her skull was confirmed uncracked, Cyborg waited patiently for all the anti-neurotixin to drain out of the IV fluid bag before he carefully removed the needle on her wrist. A precaution, he'd said, which the rest of them had administered via a shot. Then he looked up at Star, who looked up at Robin, who might as well have counted loudly to ten on his fingers before gesturing to the other two and telling Raven they'd be right back (_we're pretty damn obvious for a bunch of detectives and crimefighters_).

And she was alone in the infirmary with Beast Boy, who'd been deathly silent ever since they'd both been loaded into the T Car, her with a suspected concussion or even skull fracture, him with an injured arm and what Cyborg quietly mused might be mild emotional shock.

"Raven."

She didn't even attempt to feign sleep. She ignored him barefacedly, even while in her weakened state all his emotions were vivid as screaming voices in her head.

"Raven. Raven."

She pulled the thin pillow from under her head and pressed it over her face instead. _Eagerness, confusion, half-aknowledged hurt, anxiety…_

"Raven. Rae-Oomph!"

Raven had to concede that it was a perfectly acceptable loss of a pillow as shock and annoyance drowned the others out for a bit.

"Okay I get it, you don't wanna talk."

"Ooh, he can take a hint."

"And hey, it talks!"

"So not funny." Even though the silly barb had her wrestling with the grin on her face, because a joking Beast Boy was a minimally healthy Beast Boy.

"I'm wounded. Get it, because I'm hurt too?"

"Are you?"

"Your half-formed shield thingy absorbed a bit of the damage, but I did kinda get it." She sat up. His uniform was pulled down again, but he was wearing a plain white wifebeater, and his left bicep was swathed in gauze. Raven swung her legs over the edge of the cot and alarm flared all around her. "Wait, don't!" He felt guilty, probably at having her get out of bed with the crease between her eyes that they knew meant pain, but she would have to do it sooner or later.

"It's OK. It's my job." She drew the swivel chair to her and motioned for him to lie back down. The wound, from the way it was dressed, meant no broken bones, but was at least deep enough to warrant tight wrapping. She pressed a hand over his arm and channeled the energies.

"I feel like I've said this a bajillion times these past few weeks, but thanks Rae. I owe you big time."

"No you don't."

"Yes I do."

"No. This is what we do." She pushed her hand against his arm a little harder, willing the energy to knit together strained muscles. "We do stupid things for…each other. All of us. Since day one."

He felt…tentative, reflexive, then a pinprick of realization appeared. "I know." He reached up to scratch his ear. "Like that time with the Gordanians."

She tried hard not to get soppy. "You remember."

"Sure I do! You were all creepy and lonesome, but I was about to get pounded and you popped up, and you didn't let go even when Lord Uglyface was coming at us." He felt happy, oddly nostalgic, glad. Glad to have had her near? Glad at having her here now? Empathy, Raven groused, was a vastly overrated power. Sometimes it felt like having the answers, only written in a language she couldn't understand.

"The girl made it out alright."

He dimmed. So sad. "She did."

"I'm glad." Her hand pulsed. "I can understand what you meant, with her."

"They just look so much alike, and with the statue missing…" anguish, so much anguish. Then abrupt determination and just a hint of relief. "But she's happier you know? And I kinda don't think it matters, whether she's Terra or not."

Raven frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I mean…I just don't care if she doesn't remember or if she really doesn't want to. The girl I knew…Terra…she was her past and her memories, and if she doesn't want them, if she's happier like that, well."

Raven thought she understood. Turned to stone or not, Terra had always vehemently wanted normalcy, and Beast Boy, was anything but. Raven personally believed her turning to Slade had been, at least in part, a violent reaction against the crushing responsibility of taking care of others. Causing chaos was wanton, free. Selfish, she might add, but even she could admit that heroism was exhausting.

"Raise your arm a bit." She gently pulled the gauze away to heal a strange puncture, caused by a bo staff most likely. So the Sladebot had had some fight in it left after all. But it got her thinking of Slade's thinly veiled suggestions... "So…crossed swords with carnies lately?"

"Uh…"

"You ran into Slade before now."

He hung his head in defeat. "In the old carnival, the one that shut down. The fun house." Where he'd been with Terra on his date. Huh.

"Anything you'd like to share with the class?"

"He mostly just goaded me. Told me Terra didn't want to remember me in particular."

"Slade has this amazing ability to lie, even when he's telling the truth." Vague annoyance. He disagreed.

"I ripped his face to pieces."

Which was a difficult task even when they were all together. "You were angry."

"…"

"You were right to be. But if Slade says it, you can be sure it's the wrong train of thought. Trust me." She looked at him, and she could see his face soften just a little.

"Like I said…it kinda doesn't matter anymore. And I feel like…well, I might be at another place in my life now. Or about to be." He felt calm, happy. "Rob trusts me with stuff. Cy asks me things, real things, not like when I changed my underwear last."

"Spare me the details."

He laughed. "OK. But yeah, he asks me stuff. When I walk into the JLA, I'm not just the funny green sidekick anymore. Mento has to call me 'sir' during debates, and sometimes I think he means it. I don't know. I'm still handsome comic relief guy, like always." He was joking a little, for her sake apparently. "But people take me seriously now." He smiled, and she felt like smiling back. For a few precious moments, there was content. Then all his emotions muted abruptly, and the anxiety returned alone. "Can I ask _you_ a question?"

"…sure." Her powers were flagging. The wound would need stitches even after she was done.

"This might sound totally weird. So I'm sorry. But this past month or so…and tonight…is something going on with you Rae?"

Her powers had stopped flowing, but her hand remained on his arm, over the gauze.

"I mean I know I'm not Captain Observant or anything. I kinda think you'll be calling me an idiot to my face any minute, heh." He was deeply embarrassed. "I just…there's these moments where I think you feel all weird and quiet. Like when something is eating at you. And if it's a bad thing, you'll probably hide it forever before it busts out and tries to end the world because you want to protect everyone but yourself." He sighed. "Which sucks, 'cause we're kinda your best friends and we'd do anything for you. But I don't know why…I think it's not the end of the world this time."

His emotions fluctuated between anxious and resigned for a long minute. He must have realized she wasn't healing anymore, but made no move to push her hand away.

"It's…hard to put into words."

"Then try." The anxiety deepened.

"I don't know if you want to hear this."

A pause. Determination. "I do."

"It's hard to digest and complicated."

"You're gonna have to spell it out for me, then."

Raven thought of doing it. It was the way she did things sometimes, with halting words and steady gestures. She could even watch the scene unfolding in her mind, how she'd start by trying to explain it was nobody's fault, how she'd blunder through each of the things she'd felt like they were the symptoms of a disease, how she'd throw her hands up in frustration for not finding the right words, scream the dreaded three words, cause a power surge or a few ruptured screens and then the obligatory loss of control and stalk from the infirmary in a rage (at him, at herself, at the world in general).

But she didn't. Because Raven's actions sometimes spoke louder than her halting words.

Raven didn' register rising from the chair at all. Beast Boy, up on his cot, was just suddenly accesible to her. She put her right hand on his shoulder gently first, timid, then cupped his chin and nudged it fractionally upwards, so he was staring into her eyes, the one part of her that just might reflect her emotions more plainly. Her left hand came up, and she lay the open palm against his cheek, thumb stroking high cheekbones before reaching up to drag it through his hair, short nails scoring his scalp very softly and eliciting the faintest of tremors. She traced his eyebrows, both in a perfect arch from the wide-eyed stare he was giving her, and she wondered whether they were black or just a very dark shade of green. Finally, slowly, Raven traced his thin lips, the pads of her finger catching a little on the dry, chapped, very warm skin.

For a brief, delirious moment, Raven wondered how the dryness would feel on her own lips.

Beast Boy's jaw slacked further in response and Raven could see the faintest blush, more maroon than red, appearing like an inkstain under the cheekbones she'd touched so gently before. She could see confusion in his eyes. When her empathic senses allowed his myriad emotions to pour into her, she managed to sense the exact moment when everything came together for him. Realization, like a flash. Fiat lux.

What could he see now, she wondered? Her silence, protectiveness. Her anger, fluster and worry. Her attention, affection with just the slightest hint of a petulant, childish possessiveness.

"Rae…"

"Yeah. Yes."

She allowed herself to touch a finger to his lower lip as his mouth remained parted in shock. Then slowly, deliberately, Raven turned her back on Beast Boy, on Garfield Logan, on _Gar_, and walked out of the infirmary.


	6. Interlude: The Red Herring

Robin wandered through the kitchen. He'd marched straight there after leaving the infirmary, telling himself he might like to sit in the common room, quiet as it was in the dark before morning. He'd gotten restless, then decided he'd see how well stocked the pantry might be, and then figured he really needed to check the refrigerator, despite it being three in the morning. He needed to plan future grocery trips and budget. Of course he had to.

It was laughably easy now. A year ago, no amount of minute chores would have stopped him from barricading himself in the evidence room to obsess over Slade.

He'd never think it wrong to dedicate himself so thoroughly to his cases, because anticipating moves here, coming up ahead there, it meant reduced damage, and more importantly, it meant lives were saved. But he knew himself well enough now to control his zeal when Slade was involved, because the road to Hell was paved with good intentions.

The pneumatic door opened. "Yo." Cyborg walked in and settled himself in front of the TV, barely sparing him a glance in terribly forced nonchalance, like it was perfectly normal for him to be up and about at this hour (or rather, like he knew it was entirely abnormal for him to be up and was pretending it wasn't). He began flipping through channels before settling on some rerun of a program on hyped-up, 'true' hauntings. "Bullshit claims played late at night for extra spooks…"

"Yeah, terrible." His heart wasn't in it, but Cyborg was playing at normalcy for all he was worth, and Robin hardly wanted to push him.

Another muted swoosh, and Starfire came in. "I seem to have misplaced Silkie." She looked around the notably Silkie-less room. "Has anyone seen him?"

"Nope."

"No."

"…oh. I shall inspect the room none the less."

Robin barely suppressed a sigh. _Could Silkie be hiding behind one of the elephants in the room? _

They all hedged for a little longer, Robin looking for the right bottle of soda from among twenty identical others, Cyborg muttering expletives at the shaky camera scenes, Starfire drifting about the ceiling beams.

All of them were rattled at Slade's reappearance, but if he knew his team like he did, that particular topic was too raw for discussion. They were there for the comfort of each other's presence, even if they couldn't say why aloud. And of course, the other thing going on, the one that had them all running from the infirmary and the halls, was probably hanging heavily on their minds as well. And that one was fair game for discussion, as soon as someone gathered the guts to say it.

Starfire was the one to cave. Naturally. "I cannot pretend nothing is going on!" She landed heavily on the couch. "Please, we must discuss the situation unfolding. We are all three aware and must act forgetful no more."

Cyborg hesitated for all of a minute before finally turning off the TV. "Thought I was going straight up _crazy_ for a minute there." He threw the control onto the corner seat. "Have you seen the way those two have been flirting lately? Real subtle. Blink and you miss it. But you get to know them both for years, and it's just…there."

"Yes! And friend Raven has been fabricating excuses for certain activities. She has been very good at misdirecting but I have noticed she excuses herself more when she is in the vicinity of Beast Boy. There is an overcurrent of communication that she thinks is invisible."

"Undercurrent, Star."

"Yes yes, undercurrent. But tonight, something has happened."

"You can say that again. Not literally." Cyborg visibly deflated. "I thought Rae was doing a pretty good job of keeping herself and BB in the dark, up until tonight. That thing with Tara..." he winced, sympathetic.

"Oh, correct. Friend Raven's face betrayed nothing at all, and if asked I believe she will say that her actions were related to the apparent certainty that Tara is Terra, and her confusing status before she became stone. But her voice was not right."

"She'll lie like a rug, no question to it. But I know what you mean. This is Raven's version of acting rashly, doing things without anticipating seven moves ahead. And Raven doesn't go loose bullet for just anyone." Silence settled over the room. Robin wondered if the highly entertained pair would notice if he slipped away…

"Mighty quiet over there, Rob. I can hear your gears turning." _Busted_. Star was looking at him now too. He put on his best noncooperative expression. "Robin you are _not serious_."

"Robin please, we have been most anxious to hear your thoughts on the situation!"

He expected them to go there, because he was both the most closely observant of the Titans, and the one person other than Beast Boy who could understand the mystery that was Raven's psyche. Beast Boy, he suspected, understood Raven on a level even he didn't at times, but lacked either the right words or the awareness of it. And of course, nobody was about to go ply him for information, not while _this_ was happening.

He crossed his arms. "What do you want me to say? I think you two have it straightened out." The stares held. "Yes, Raven clearly has a crush on Beast Boy." Crushes were serious business when Raven was concerned, but she would likely feel protective of that kind of information, and Robin could respect that. "But if we're talking game here, Cyborg is the person we should be pestering."

"Oh of course!"

"Huh?"

"You're Beast Boy's best friend, Cy."

Cyborg caught on quickly, and inexplicably looked…put out. Which either meant Raven didn't stand a chance, or that any information was barred because he'd been sworn to secrecy.

Robin was moved to pity. "You don't have to say anything if you can't."

"It's…not that." Cyborg leaned back, crossing his legs and tossing his head back. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but when it comes to this? BB is _complicated_." He moved his neck, relieving pressure. "I get the sense that he flirts back a little, here and there. He's always made it his life's mission to get Rae involved and stuff. But then it gets pretty damn complex."

"I have gotten the impression that Earth ways with the hiding and the ceremony are odd in courtship."

But Robin thought Cyborg meant it was a little more than that. "You sound like you've had a lot of time to think about this."

Cyborg laughed heartily at that. "You serious man?" At his silence, Cyborg's smile became shrewd. "Best detective in the world? Seriously Rob, you might wanna hand in your badge." Then his entire demeanor softened, as it usually did when he talked about his friends. "The grass stain's been playing hide and seek with a crush on Raven ever since we first checked out the abandoned Gordanian probe ship this tower was built on."

"What? Since we-but how did you…?"

Cyborg chuckled. "You shoulda seen the stars in the kid's eyes when Raven told him he was kinda funny. But you were busy being starry-eyed over someone else, so I guess you missed it." Starfire ducked her head.

It was late, there was going to be an avalanche of reports and calls come morning light, and Cyborg seemed to suddenly realize he'd all but dangled a big juicy slice of information in front of Robin's nose that involved over two years of hints. "Can we do this some other time?"

"I know it's late Cyborg, but I have a feeling we won't have time to talk about this kind of thing for a few days." This kind of light gossiping was practically a luxury in their fast-paced schedules, especially since their subjects of conversation were rarely, if ever, not present when things were talked about.

"I gotcha." He sighed. "How about an abridged version?"

"I guess I can accept that."

"As will I." Star even inched away when Robin came over, so he could sit beside Cyborg as he gave them the facts.

"Look, this isn't exactly my forte, and the course of true love didn't run smooth or whatever. BB took a shine to Raven pretty fast back then because she was a girl, because she was pretty and because he thought she'd given him an opening – he was a kid, can't blame him for not having the strictest standards. Then we started living together and the team solidified and while he still wanted to be around her, I think the crush stayed on low for a while. Then there was Terra." Cyborg shifted. "Again, can't blame the kid. Pretty blonde hero girl who laughs at all his jokes, trounces him at videogames and gives him the time of day? I've never talked this over with B, but I'll bet you my baby's chassis he fell in love with Terra faster than he falls asleep during World of Fungus."

Starfire sighed. "That would be quite fast."

Robin could hardly blame him, given the soothing monotone that the narrator of Star's favorite show possessed. "I know." Robin confessed in a sigh. Cyborg peered at him guardedly, like he was surprised he actually knew _something_. "About Terra, I mean. I found him in Terra's room, later. He had…a box."

Once, and only once, Robin had tried Terra's room while looking for Beast Boy after the night of the attack on the tower. He'd looked at the green dog on her bed, with its body curled up around a heart-shaped box, for all of ten seconds before sliding the door closed. He'd found no words.

There was a moment of dejection between the three of them. Terra's presence had put a strain on the team dynamics due to her quiet feud with Raven and her near-comical ability to distract Beast Boy, but the loss of her to Slade was hardly a relief.

Cyborg nodded in commiseration after a while. "Man, do I ever remember those days…I never tried to go inside, but there was nowhere else he'd be. Started leaving him a plate of tofu burger with soy cheese under an overturned bowl by the door until B finally found it in him to eat on his own. Those were bad times. For him, I'd say it even got a little worse after she turned to stone. Nasty way to lose a first love. But see, this is where it gets a little…denser, if you ask me at least. The next big thing was when Raven struck it up with that Malchior dude, and it was like someone had lit a fire under his butt again. Remember how he spied on her? And then he went Frankenstein, and it was her picking up the pieces. I can't tell for certain, but I'd say that's when Raven got back on his radar."

Robin took a good few minutes to turn the new facts over. _Frankenstein, rather than Mr. Hyde, because Beast Boy's feral form was just misunderstood. _He nodded to himself. _Appropriate_.

"Do you mean he crushes her too, then?" Star was all wide-eyed, innocent hope.

"Not quite Star. Sorry. I mean, we're all friends, we all pick each other off the floor a whole lot. Sometimes literally. What Rae did for him, she'd do for any of us. And come on, those two have this, this understanding and somehow always go to the other when it hits the fan. Normal, all of it. But there might have been a spark again, right then. And it's been there, on the back burner, until now. A few weeks ago."

"After Adonis. When he felt Raven might care." Robin had his legs up in a lotus position on the couch, deeply contemplative. "I understand." Raven was, naturally, very attuned to their emotions. He'd noticed her paying more attention to Beast Boy after the mysterious white shapeshifter had been disabled, while he'd presumably been mourning Terra again for reasons he refused to disclose. His two teammates' dynamic had shifted subtly several times over the days after that, during which Robin had suspected. Her transporting the entire table while they were out for pizza for his sake had finalized his opinion on the matter.

"I believe we must do the looking out from now on, in case our friends need to borrow an ear. And leave them to resolve the problem, because I think even friend Beast Boy cannot be oblivious after tonight." Robin and Cyborg both nodded. This was the kind of thing that could threaten team dynamics again, even with both of the involved being very apt at focusing on work rather than play (well, for the most part).

Cyborg looked at the digital clock in his arm and grimaced. "I'm gonna go up in another minute or three. Should be done dishing out, those two."

"Too much to wish they're making out on one of the cots, isn't it?"

Even Starfire's laughter had a subtle edge of unhappiness.

* * *

They had a quick meeting over the topic of Slade as early as it was deemed possible next morning. Beast Boy was very quiet for the length of it, rubbing a newly stitched arm half consciously until they'd almost resolved to label this Slade's first appearance since their return from Paris. Which was when Beast Boy finally told them he'd confronted a Sladebot at the recently closed amusement park, to which Raven suspiciously reacted very little.

Given current events, Robin chastised him lightly (for Robin, at least), took careful note of his account, decided Cyborg and Raven would check out the place after breakfast, and couldn't help but notice how Beast Boy's shoulders tensed as the tip of Raven's cloak dragged across his side, accidentally, when she spun around too strongly as she headed for the door of the Evidence Room. Then there were things to do that required his full attention and he effortlessly put Raven and Beast Boy out of his mind, realizing he'd worked through lunch only when Cyborg and Raven returned with information and a few images from the Sladebot. Or rather, what was left of it.

"Deep, uneven gouges on its torso, likely from serrated teeth longer than a foot. And most probably found in the mouth of something green." Cyborg clicked forwards on the file to a few images of the partially collapsed rollercoaster, and the view of a hall that seemingly consisted of empty frames and a floor littered with shards upon shards of reflective glass.

Raven, who had been unnaturally still as Cyborg presented his image files, changed posture very discretely at the sight of the fun house. "That's where he says the Sladebot first engaged him." Compounding it with the fact that it had been the site of his and Terra's only date, one that had also featured an appearance by Slade at the fun house, Robin didn't need to press Raven for the insider information she clearly had to figure out exactly what their longtime nemesis had used to trigger that sort of violence from Beast Boy.

_Terra, Terra, and once more, Terra._

* * *

For what felt like a small eternity, Robin tried to discern Slade's motives.

It stood to reason that Slade had, perhaps, become interested in Beast Boy. None of the Titans had begrudged him the spotlight once the epic that their dismantling of the Brotherhood of Evil was fast becoming hit the press, but how leadership skills and determination alone would appeal to a master criminal were slightly less clear to Robin. Slade had wanted Raven for her value as a bartering chip, and he'd wanted Robin himself due to a combination of identification and a desire to train his interpretation of a worthy successor (whether said successor approved or not).

By the time Starfire came to frog march him to dinner, making it clear that no was not an acceptable answer, Robin had constructed a few hypotheses and run a few conjectural scenarios that left him mostly at ease. Even when you knew not to take Slade's words at face value, and even though his silence while Titans East had been manning the Tower was worrisome, it was likely he really was merely testing the waters, seeing how his enemies had grown since their triumphant return, and planning accordingly. He was well informed enough to know a world network of Titans had made a surprise visit to Dr. Light the last time he attempted a bank bust, and even Slade had to consider a significant up in manpower when he schemed.

They were, it seemed, in the clear for the time being.

Dinner was a mostly normal affair, even though Starfire was being a little forcedly flamboyant, and Raven seemed to hold her breath every time she thought someone was about to address her. Cyborg and Beast Boy were carrying on just a little too cheerfully as well, though he lost track of the conversation after Cyborg very nearly rhapsodized about the smoked herring he'd enjoyed during their stint through the Canadian wilds after a false lead on Monsieur Mallah.

"Dude, you complained it was like licking a block of salt, like, for _days_ afterwards."

"Acquired taste, B. I might just go out to the fancier fisheries to see if they get it down here, make me some. With onions and mayo." He hummed in delight at the thought of the taste. "I might just forgive the internet for robbing me of the movie rental experience if it keeps puttin' out recipes like that."

Star beamed. "I have found the shop with the worms of sour gumminess relocated to one of the malls, so the internal net is quite nearly forgiven in my case."

"The bookshop moved there too," mentioned Raven offhandedly. "It has an adjoining café now, to avoid getting run aground."

Then Robin abruptly realized he'd forgotten the variable of Terra, now Tara, in his conjectures, and lost himself so thoroughly in said conjectures, he might have sat at the table a good portion of the night if Cyborg had not snapped him out of it when he started picking up empty plates for dish duty.

* * *

Hours later, when the rest (minus Raven) had likely turned it, Robin still felt distinctly blindsided.

As a young child under Bruce's custody, they'd gone on an impromptu vacation to Japan once, which included a stay of several days in upbeat, ultramodern Tokyo and forays into smaller, often downright backwater little towns. He suspected now that Bruce had been following a lead of some sort or perhaps trying to shake off a few someones, often leaving him to explore with Alfred while he 'talked business' or 'went sightseeing', but his memories were bright temples and an elaborate martial arts display, exotic tastes that were sometimes interesting and delicious, and sometimes downright unclassifiable.

He remembered a small fried eel stand where an inexperienced little clerk was failing miserably at capturing the next batch out of a barrel for 'fresh fried unagi'. The owner had eventually given up the ghost and caught the eel himself, telling his young aide something in the rapid, sharp-cut sounds that was Japanese to Robin's ears, and Alfred had laughed discretely.

"He said, young master Richard, that the key to catching an eel is not to grab it by force, but to anticipate its movements and grasp at seemingly empty space."

The words had impressed him, moreso as they later served to accommodate Bruce's lessons in critical thinking and logic, but on days like this he felt like he'd taken the words too close to heart and was grasping at the eel before it even swam past.

There was someone sulking in the hall of the Evidence Room. "Late night, Beast Boy."

"Uhuh." Beast Boy looked ready to simply be on his way. The he wove on his feet for a little. "You're gonna go obsess over Slade for a bit?"

"Maybe."

"Figured."

"Wait." Beast Boy froze midstep, looking back at him "Is there-"

"No. I mean-"

"Beast Boy, if you need a sounding board…I'd be glad to help." They'd never managed closeness, first because Beast Boy was too starstruck at the beginning by Robin's status, then because their dynamic always felt too vertical, Robin-the-leader and Beast-Boy-the-goofy-underling. Until they became partners for the legal procedures concerning the Brotherhood, and Robin found himself not only depending on him, but actually learning from him the complex art of wrangling Mento.

_Until now._

"Okay. Okay." He tilted his head towards the Evidence Room door. "Mind if we go in?"

Robin nodded. He moved to sit behind his desk, then caught himself and dragged the chair around, to sit beside him.

Beast Boy seemed more at ease. He looked around at the walls, hung with newspapers, looked at his hands. Looked straight into his eyes. "It's just something I thought about. I was thinking of all the people we met. The places we visited. We've grown up a lot."

Robin just nodded in his own slow, deliberate way. He might not show them his eyes often, but the Robin-nod was the kind of thing that he knew let them know they had his entire and complete attention. Beast Boy's body language responded in kind, his arms uncrossing and shoulders relaxing.

"So I was thinking of Aqualad and Kole and Jinx and Red Star and…Terra."

Robin's left eyebrow rose.

"And Raven."

Robin's right eyebrow joined it.

"And how all this makes me feel about them."

"Oh."

"Yeah…I've kinda been thinking about this since Russia. When Starfire flew Red Star out into space. That was brave. Aqualad becoming the outcast to keep all his people safe was brave too. And Kole living out on her own with Gnark without technology, because it made Gnark go all skitzo, and Jinx breaking it off with the Brotherhood because it felt wrong to her."

"I think I know where you're going."

He smiled. "Yeah, maybe. What I mean is…Jinx was sorta raised evil. She knew better. Red Star was a brave guy working for the army, realized how much harm he'd done and even though everyone turned his back on him…he knew better. And Raven. All her life, everyone told her she was evil, and how her fate was to destroy the world whether she liked it or not. And she knew better. So many of them just knew better." He slumped in his chair. "What I mean is…Terra, she might have been misguided. She might have been scared and confused. But in the end, it was all about her, you know? Her fear and her insecurity and who was important to her. She took me out on that date because she couldn't bear me getting hurt, but she didn't think about what would happen to me when I figured out what'd happened to you guys. I mean, there we were on that Ferris wheel being all, uh…"

"Intense? "

"…ah, heh, embarrassing. But yeah." He had, he realized, the decency to blush. "And yet all she wanted to do was make sure I wouldn't hate her. You guys were going down bad, and she wanted me keeping her secrets." The corners of his mouth were turned down. "I don't mean to say she was evil, just wrong and misled. I can forgive her. But with everything we've lived through, the things I know we can do….sorry doesn't cut it. She was nice. But she was selfish and...I guess...it changes a few things."

"I understand." Robin leaned his arms on his knees. "You've moved on."

"I…yeah. Terra and I…if she ever wants to return…I'm here. And we'll get along OK. But that's all."

"And Raven?"

"Huh?"

"You said you'd been thinking about Raven."

"I did, didn't I?" The blush returned in earnest. He didn't demur or stall with jokes. He slumped forward a little. "Raven is complicated."

"You can say that again."

"I always thought Raven hated me. No, OK, maybe not hate. Ever since I sorta took a stroll through her mind, I knew she cared. That we were friends. But then I'd think, we're heroes, y'know? She's a hero. Heroine. Whatever. We're always risking our lives for people we don't know. And she meditates with Star and helps Cyborg around the autoparts, talks to you…I know I'm her friend and that she'd give up pretty much everything for me. But in the context of Raven that's not saying much. I'm her least favorite friend."

"You know it's not like that-"

"But it _is_ the truth! Or…" He ran his hands through his hair, agitated. "Or at least, that's what it was, at first. We did get along better after Malchior. But she…told me something yesterday. In the infirmary." He looked up, his eyes sure despite his small nervous movements, his clenched fists. He didn't look like the youngest Titan at that moment: he was looking at the hero who raised the morale of four washed-up fighters and taken on a legion, at insurmountable odds. Someone who knew the gravity of a situation, but was breathing in for the leap. "It's funny. When you think things are going one way, and they go another, and the other way was something you might sort of want, or might not…I guess, the more things change, the more they stay the same."

Robin nodded. _Things change, but not always…sometimes you think the eel wants to go left when it means to go right…_

_Feint, misdirection. False leads…._

_The red, red dust on Terra, no, Tara's dress…_

Robin got up so fast his chair fell backward with a clatter. "Holy fuck."

"…dude, did I break you or something?" Robin ignored him as he rushed to the other side of the desk, riffling through to the transcript of Beast Boy's encounter with Slade. He righted his chair and seated himself, leaning sideways against the desk with his pen poised over the transcript. Beast Boy eyed him with no small amount of shock.

"Beast Boy, I need you to go over this with me, one more time." Because whatever it might appear to external observers, Slade _always_ had a plan.

* * *

_**A/N:** If anyone happens to catch on to what Robin believes is Slade's plan, you get a virtual cookie._


	7. Terminus, Part One: The Red Flag

_Beep. Beep._

The sheer foreignness of the sound woke her up. Raven's older tin alarm clock, of course, did not beep. She'd barely put her fingers over the screen of her communicator when Robin's voice came through.

"All Titans report to the Evidence Room. It is urgent."

* * *

Robin and Beast Boy looked like they hadn't so much as let their eyelids droop throughout the night. In his chair just within Robin's blind spot, Beast Boy covered yawn after yawn as they all filed in dutifully.

"We haven't discussed Slade all that much lately, for obvious reasons, but I think we might need to refresh a few things." Robin tapped his papers, obsessively aligning them all. "First…I think we can all be sure that Slade is alive again. He is definitely flesh and blood."

"You mean his little trip down under was a success?" Cyborg's eyebrow was just the slightest bit arched in barely contained shock. "When he came back to help fight Trigon with that huge axe, he still seemed pretty superpowered to me."

His words sparked something in Raven's memory. "The axe _is_ proof." Everyone wheeled around to look at her. "It's the axe of a Reaper. They guard the different doorways of the…Underworld." Raven felt a flash of their collective fear.

Starfire flicked at her bangs in discomfort. "That means Slade has accomplished something involving the powers of the World Beneath, but what?"

"Going by what he said himself, and Raven just confirmed? He went to Hell, collected his soul and came back to life." She must have shown some sign of discomfort, because Robin glanced at her, looking commiserating. "I know, the idea disturbs me too."

Cyborg whistled. "That is the understatement of the century. I'm not the magic expert around here, but I for one wonder what collecting his soul back might have changed in him. Did it give him powers? Another demon buddy? Is he…even still mortal?"

Cyborg was too humane to word it just so, but Raven knew he was wondering if their longtime nemesis was still killable. Even though taking lives was against everything they stood for, even though none of them felt the slightest bit of joy at it, she'd long had the feeling that that was what it would come down to with Slade.

Robin's shoulders had gone rigid. "Those are very important points we need to look into Cy, thanks." He reshuffled the papers one more time, doubtlessly trying to step past the implication. "But we're getting off track. Beast Boy and I may have managed to figure out the method behind Slade's apparent madness." He took a step back and lay a hand on Beast Boy's shoulders.

Beast Boy sighed, glancing down at the ground briefly before looking back up with determined eyes. "We believe Slade was trying to get me to morph into feral form."

A slight impression of cold informed Raven that her face had rained of what little color it had, and she felt both Starfire and Cyborg jolt with shock.

Robin looked at the other two, then caught her gaze and nodded. "Slade is clever. He probably realized Beast Boy has an ability he hasn't seen him manifest again since he attacked the tower with Trigon's flame demons. We went through a lot of potential reasons for attacking a bunch of high school students. Terror tactics, experimentation. I even wondered if going through Hell to have his mortality restored might have made him go insane."

Cyborg scoffed under his breath "Right. Because he was this paragon of mental health before." Raven couldn't agree more.

Robin heard him anyway. "He's disturbingly sane in his planning, sadly. Slade's deduced that Beast Boy doesn't turn into his feral form on just any old occasion, that there are certain triggers involved, and he's been exposing Beast Boy to every one."

Beast Boy nodded, his entire posture grim. "That's also why he ambushed me in the old fairground. He was trying trigger number one, rage."

Raven caught on not a second later. Beast Trigger Number Two: Endangering the person Slade believed Beast Boy cared for the most. As far as Slade knew, as far as any of them knew, that person was Terra. When she chanced a backward glance, Cyborg's expression had gone sympathetic, and Starfire's mouth had opened in a gasp before, inexplicably, her eyes flicked briefly towards Raven.

"So now he's interested in Beast Boy's feral form. Why?"

"He could be interested in recruiting him." When Beast Boy snorted, Robin amended, "'Recruiting' is a very ambiguous term when Slade is involved, I know." His voice lowered "He could be trying to make Beast Boy lose control. He could be trying to make him go feral on us. We haven't figured out that far ahead, but Slade's intent is fairly clear. The attack on Tara Markov wasn't so much a diversion as it was a part of the tests he's conducting."

Starfire's eyes became shrewd. "I believe he has tried to trick us without openly trying to do so. He would have let us think the attack on the High School was aimed at Te- at Tara by not explaining himself."

Raven was momentarily overwhelmed by another subtle current of fear as everyone attempted to process what it meant that Slade had become so well acquainted with their course of thought that he'd gone and tried to let them trick _themselves_. Cyborg swallowed audibly. "Well, he's had no Beast so far. Which means another little visit should be due soon."

A pregnant pause followed Cyborg's words. Robin wordlessly handed his robotic friend a small partition of the papers he'd been fiddling with, Starfire walked towards the board with the clippings, hands holding her elbows, and Raven picked up her legs, sitting in midair in a lotus position.

Beast Boy remained utterly still for all of five minutes before standing up and effectively dismissing himself, slightly wobbly with exhaustion even as he headed out of the Evidence Room, head held high. Raven kept her gaze locked on the floor, determined never to discover if he'd spared her a glance before leaving, or if he'd looked away studiously.

* * *

There was too much emotion outside of her room, inside of herself: Raven had a cup of tea immediately after the meeting, then promptly locked herself up and meditated the day away.

The sky's colors were well into bleeding towards dusk when she emerged, having achieved some semblance of peace, into the common room. She had wandered into the kitchen area, pondering the consequences of putting food into her badly coiled stomach when she heard the pneumatic doors open. When no heavy metallic footsteps followed, no exuberant hello resounded, she knew.

"Hi…Raven." _Floof_. One of the cushions on the couch exploded into stuffing and torn fabric.

"Hello Beast Boy." Her senses cautioned her against turning to face him in her precariously balanced state, and a very brief war in favor of opening herself up to his emotions was lost to her restraint. Though Raven had to admit she hardly needed her powers to interpret the slight movement and shuffling behind her as a very, very disconcerted changeling.

He moved forward, closer. Then he moved back. She guessed he was fiddling with his hands. More shuffling. His steps moved away, towards the couch and likely towards the decimated cushion. Raven remained perfectly still, feeling his eyes on her the whole time.

Raven slowly counted ten minutes. When the Mexican Standoff became too much for her, she opened a portal and sank through the floor.

"Wha-WAIT!"

Raven was back in her room so quickly, the distressing emotions caught up with her there and one of her own vases burst into pieces.

* * *

That very night, just shy of one in the morning, the alarm went off.

As Raven lay wide awake above her covers, in her cape and uniform, a bizarre mixture of anticipation and relief relieved the tension in her stomach. She rose from the bed, neither rushing nor stalling, but inescapably glad that the wait was finally over.

Upon arrival, Raven was surprised to discover she was the _third_ person to appear in the common room. Cyborg and Robin were already in front of the computer, and the location of the alarm was already locked on the screen.

Her heart leaped to her throat. The catacombs. The ones beneath the old library site. _The place where my father entered the world. The place where almost all of me died. _

Beast Boy skidded into the room next, wholly silent for once, and Starfire had to have appeared not long after because then they were in the garage and then the T-Car was hurtling towards one of the last places on Earth that struck fear into her heart. Fear was, however, only partly responsible for her lack of awareness. Her mind was racing while her body was on autopilot, trying to puzzle out Slade's next move.

_The fairground. The high school. The catacombs. Rage, failed on two counts, and worry failed once, with Terra. The catacombs. The place where they saw me die._

_The catacombs…_

It clicked somewhere in the vicinity of Raven's heart before it appeared as a real something in her head.

* * *

Navigating the catacombs was infinitely easier this second time, both due to Robin and Raven being able to traverse them (the latter because she knew the way, the former because he had excellent recall) and to the apparent absence of invincible, scythe-wielding specters. Raven wondered if it was a touch of paranoia, or if the group was deliberately keeping defensive formation around her as they descended, with Robin and Cyborg abreast of each other in front of her, Star and the still eerily silent Beast Boy behind her.

Cyborg's lantern bobbed as he walked, illuminating the statues and carvings. "Never dreamed I'd be down here again."

Robin nodded, not turning around. "I'm surprised at how…sound this place looks."

Cyborg scratched his neck. "I don't follow."

"Well, Raven's magic restored the entire world, so I shouldn't be surprised that this place was put back up too. I just thought, what with it being Trigon's point of entry into the world…I wondered if it would be too tainted." At that, he looked over his shoulder, and while the contrast of illumination made it harder, Raven knew he was looking at her. "This is a temple for you, isn't it? It was built to honor you."

Beneath the cover of her cloak, Raven's mouth slacked very slightly in surprise. "Clever."

"Was it built by the people of Azarath, Friend Raven?"

"Yes and no. This temple was made based on visions of what would happen, by Trigon's followers, hundreds of years ago. A few of them defected to Azarath when they realized what they were worshipping, but the cult itself was made up mostly by Earth humans."

Beast Boy's voice, unexpected, nearly made her jump. "Wow, so this is really the Temple of Raven?" Raven forcibly stopped herself from smiling at him like a ninny for the admiring tone.

It had been built centuries before her birth was even a remote possibility, erected by corrupted cultists who based it on the prophecies that heralded her as the Gem. It was a tribute to wanton destruction and evil, with her present only as a mindless instrument.

The beam of Cyborg's light caught a large statue with a blank face and an eerily familiar cloak.

_Okay, tribute to evil with very creepily accurate detail. I can allow them that._

They walked deeper in, coming closer to the chamber where the Hand was. She wondered if it was still there, or if it had vanished after Trigon had-

"Raven!" She was flung sideways violently, metal and stone crashed together, and a green bear materialized between herself and the wall before the impact.

"Very good, Beast Boy. You might not be such a failure after all." Slade was hefting the Reaper's axe back onto his shoulder, and Raven knew its blade had struck the very place she'd stood in not a minute before.

The axe! "That's not a decoy!"

Behind her, Beast Boy was himself again. "Huh?"

"That is the real, actual Slade. Not a robot. Only the person who obtained the axe can wield it." She hurried to her feet. The others were already converging on Slade, Starfire's fists glowing like searchlights. "DON'T LET THE BLADE TOUCH YOU!"

"Dude, this is, like, the second time in six years I've ever heard you scream." Raven wheeled around and pressed her hands to Beast Boy's chest, clenching the material of his shirt tightly.

"The stories say that blade can cut through anything. Even demon flesh. Even souls." She looked into his eyes brazenly, not removing her hands. "Stay safe. Please. _Gar_."

Beast Boy blinked. "I will." His wide eyes and firmly clenched jaw told her of a mixture of confusion and seriousness. Raven removed one hand, then pressed the other over his heart. _In for a penny…_

She was airborne already when it struck her. A penny. She would have laughed at herself if ahead of her Slade hadn't just halved Robin's bo staff, straight down the middle, like it was dough being parted for kneading. As he jumped back, Slade's head turned to her.

"It seems the lovers have finally joined our dance. _Wonderful_. I'm afraid, however, that the dance floor is about to get…crowded."

He righted the axe and slammed its base against the floor. The sound echoed throughout the chamber. It became lost in the silence.

Cyborg heard them first. His eyebrow shot up. "Winged reapers! Incoming at twelve o clock!"

Surely enough, the chamber was soon immersed in screeches, and a thick flock of the skeletal creatures descended upon the Titans en masse.

* * *

_AN: I apologize profusely for the long wait. Shout out to Artemis Raven Courtney, who realized Terra/Tara was a decoy._


	8. Terminus, Part Two: In For a Pound

All Raven knew for a minute was the screeching of the guardians, like the shrill screams would be in her ears forever.

Then she gathered herself and sent a wave into them, obliterating many on impact and dispersing the rest. Without the screeching cloud to obscure her vision, Raven finally saw the battle.

Robin and Cyborg were attempting to move further into the chamber. Robin was battling the specters furiously, throwing explosive birdarangs high into the air before batting them away with what remained of his Bo staff – the self-inflicted detonation pushed the specters back, and it struck her that this was probably the only thing Robin could do against these enemies, intangible and untouchable through martial arts. Cyborg's lasers and rays would have probably fared better, but he was running under the cover of Robin's defense, stopping to shoot occasionally before moving forward, always forward, to the greater chamber. The one with the Hand, Raven realized.

Star was faring only slightly better, her rays effective but limited in range, and being able to shoot only a few at a time allowed the specters to gather thickly around her, even as she tried to shake them off with aerial acrobatics.

And in the center of the antechamber, surrounded by a ring of specters, Slade wielded the Reaper's axe against a speedy green velociraptor, which then became then a tiny flicker of a hummingbird, before a wrong step caused Slade's swing to go wide and a grizzly bear managed to land a powerful hit to his right shoulder, only for their nemesis to regain the upper hand when a specter careened towards the bear.

The specters, Raven knew, weren't really answering to Slade. Mindless protectors of the temple, they attacked everything without differentiation, and so it was soon clear to her that they were only keeping away from him and Beast Boy because of the axe.

Her first impulse was to go to him, but the specters quickly flocked in her way, soon surrounding her quite a lot like they were doing to Star.

Another projection of her soul-self dispersed them – but this time, Raven felt the slightest twinge of discomfort. _I can't fight them_ _like this_. She flew out of the ambush area, feinting and pivoting to confuse any hardy survivors. _I'll drain myself dry on the fifth try, and I might collapse come the sixth. _She flew straight, making them part and coming through the mouth of the corridor as fighting spilled into the cavernous Chamber of the Hand, as Robin and Cyborg advanced almost single-mindedly towards the Hand of Scath.

Try three came not a second later as Robin, with a nod, left Cyborg and ran back, likely to help the other two, only to be greeted by a wall of the wailing phantoms. Raven dispersed them, glad to bring reinforcements back to the front chamber where Slade was.

Robin tipped his head back to the base of the hand. "Help Cyborg, I'll take care of the other two". Her expression became mutinous and she made to fly straight past him and through the archway, but he held up his hands and stared at her hard. "Trust me. Let me go back. Just me."

Her face must have slacked, because Robin smiled. _Thanks and take care_. Then he was gone.

Raven flew back to Cyborg. The specters were much sparser around him, many of the lingering few having abandoned the fight altogether to careen wildly about the chamber amidst terrible shrieks. Could they be wary of the Hand of Scath?

Cyborg was adhering a metallic container, the size of a cookie jar top, to the edges of the Hand when she flew to his side. "Raven, I need you to get me up to the palm!" Raven obediently flew over his head and took hold of both his outstretched arms, then encased Cyborg in black energy to make it carry the rest of his weight. Together, they shot up the stone arm like a projectile.

"I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing! Robin told me not to return to, to Star and Beast Boy!" She looked down into her friend's face, and knew her eyes were wide and her jaw tight, making her look like a little girl lost at the carnival.

A blink-and-you'll-miss-it flash of concern appeared in Cyborg's human eye, swiftly replaced by determination. "You're fine! Just stay away from Slade and follow Rob's lead!" They touched down on the open palm and Raven set him down. "OK, is there any way to get off this thing without jumping or flying?"

Raven turned and summoned a flight of steps up from the stone floor. Cyborg eyed them with mistrust. "I can work with that." Then he stepped forward and lay a hand gently on her shoulder. "No matter what happens, just shield and hold your ground. We've got this."

"Are you seriously not telling me anything?"

"Consider it payback for not telling us the world was gonna end." Cyborg was smiling from ear to ear though.

She nodded after a beat. "I'm supposed to leave you up here then?" At his assent, Raven simply turned and flew down into the maelstrom.

Star, Robin and Beast Boy were converging on Slade as more and more specters spilled in. A few more abandoned the fight, but enough remained to be a nuisance to the fighters. An insistent trio of them tailed her as she circled the skirmish, but none of them tried to attack her again.

She was good about keeping to herself for all of five minutes. Slade agilely feinted left, then stabbed up into Star, who only barely avoided the blade. Had she had human reflexes, it would have been a hit.

Star bowled away, hitting the ground, Robin irreflexively leaped after her, clearly believing she'd been hurt, and Slade was free to bare down on Beast Boy. Momentarily distracted, Beast Boy didn't immediately leap away, moving as if to block the axe and wasting precious seconds remembering what it was. He would be too late to avoid it.

Raven gathered herself and produced the astral projection the fourth time. As her soul-self burst through the curtain of oddly still specters, she felt as if she'd taken a massive blow to the head, pulling together as best she could only to see her weakened soul-self dissolve before reaching Slade. But somehow it worked, for Slade froze for the fraction of a second Beast Boy needed to make a clean dive left, turning into a hummingbird so he could curve away into the air.

That did it. They needed her.

Ignoring the light-headedness that blurred her scenery ever so slightly, Raven nosedived towards the fighters. Slade did not see her coming, and Raven landed a clean hit below his ribs with an energy encased fist. Beast Boy took advantage of the opening as well with a well-placed kick that brought Slade down on one knee. She smiled, and he smiled back as both of them prepared to take him on together.

Slade chuckled.

"FRIEND RAVEN!" Star had only a few seconds to shake her head furiously at her as a single, low flying specter called her attention. But it was too late.

An impact with the force of a speeding train hit her shoulder from the back and Raven was flung violently on the ground, face first, before she was fully aware where she was going. Belatedly, Raven chided herself for not reacting more self-preservatively to Starfire's warning.

No matter. She tried to melt through the floor.

She couldn't. Her powers were too enfeebled. One more miscalculated effort and she'd be incapable even of blocking everyone's emotions.

A cold sensation, like holding her hand too close to an ice tray, hovered at her neck. Her entire body picked up a hum of latent energy along her back.

"And so here we are again, Raven. In your temple, before the hand of your father. You can't escape, and all your friends seem too terribly preoccupied to help. All of them…well, almost all of them."

Raven turned her head to where she'd last seen Beast Boy. His face was so contorted with rage, it looked animalistic.

_Robin's precautions. Cyborg's recommendations. My own reflections on the T-Car…._

"Let her go Slade! You're after me! That's it, isn't it? This is what it's about this time! _So come fight me!_"

_Slade's careful experiments…_

"Clever, clever, may I say. So, if you've figured out what I'm after, how about you oblige? Do it, and I'll let her go."

_The way he'd looked at me after I'd hugged him, after Malchior. The penny._

Beast Boy sobered. "You think you know so much, you know I can't just morph like that at will." His entire body took on a haughty, aggressive pose. "You've failed again, Slade."

"Ah well. If that is the case, then I might as well take my leave." His tone was laden with good humor. The cold sensation vanished, then returned even closer than before, and she saw Beast Boy's jaw fall open. "Just as soon as I claim a well-earned trophy."

"NO!"

Raven would never be sure who screamed. All she knew for sure was that a second later, the Reaper's axe lay by her side, its latent power nearly electric so close to her bare skin, and that the reverberating howls suddenly arising from somewhere far behind her were almost successfully drowning out Slade's satisfied, near maniacal peals of laughter.

Gentle hands found hers and she was stood up very quickly – or rather, she was stood up to balance precariously on uneven feet while Starfire held her up. "Are you unhurt, Friend Raven?"

Raven was at least less battered than the rest of them, which was enough motivation for a nod. Her eyes immediately sought the chamber wildly: her heart hurt as she saw the hulking form of the Beast locked in combat with Slade further into the cavernous hall, so absorbed in each other that it felt like the fight was not theirs anymore.

She looked away and saw Robin on the ground, crouched arm's length away from the axe but looking intently at her face. "I'm sorry. I caught on too late."

Star looked about as confused as Raven had felt not five minutes ago, but Robin shook his head. "It's OK. We considered the Beast being around for the plan." He looked back at the discarded weapon.

Raven immediately guessed his thoughts. "You'll burn your hand if you try. The axe only lets itself be used by whoever defeated its owner."

"So that's the real Slade fighting Beast Boy."

"Yes, it's him."

Robin's hand closed into a fist on his knee. Then he shot to his feet and held his arms out to Raven.

"Star, keep watch over the axe, and try to give Beast Boy support if you can, but avoid becoming an active participant in the fight. When Slade reclaims it, don't engage, just fly out to find us somewhere over there." He pointed in the general direction of the Hand. Starfire nodded firmly and very carefully handed Raven off to him before taking her place in the air, a good four meters over the axe.

"Can you keep the specters off of us?"

Only a small handful of specters remained close to them and the pair caught in the fight, and they seemed devoid of aggression, but Raven did not forget that the one that had felled her had looked passive. She shook her head. "I'm practically running on empty. Heavy lifting, teleporting and fancy magic tricks are pretty much out of the question."

Robin pondered this briefly. "Can you fly?"

"Not awesomely, but yeah."

He nodded, quick and slight. "Follow me. We need to get to the Hand."

* * *

They met Cyborg halfway down the endless steps that she'd summoned to the Hand of Scath. "Slade's been coming down here for a good long while. The palm and part of the way up all have carvings on them. New, shallow. Done with a precision tool."

"Is the charge set?"

"It is. Not enough for a clean domino effect, but-" Cyborg looked around them and sighed. "I take it the grass stain supersized?" At Robin's nod, his expression turned just a little grim. "That makes things a little harder."

A streak of orange came into their line of sight, but Starfire didn't wait to come closer before she delivered the news. "_Slade has acquired the axe!_"

"We're running out of time." Robin turned to Raven. "Raven. I know you're tired. I know this day, this week, the whole past year has been one long rollercoaster ride and that your powers must be on the verge of going haywire or just shutting off. But we need you. Just one last effort."

Her legs shook unstably. "OK."

"We need to blow up the Hand."

"I can't do it."

"I know. Cy's been putting explosive charges at strategic points around the hand. If we'd had enough charges we'd only need one shot and the domino effect'd do the rest, but we don't. So all of us – Cy, Star, you and me – have to take a shot at the charges, at the same time, so this thing crumbles the right way and doesn't take down the entire temple or cause Jump City any aftershocks."

"What do I have to do?"

"Fly to the line of explosives us non-fliers can't hit accurately from the ground and set them off. They're clustered close, so just focus on one and set it off with a burst of energy."

_Your plan is lacking in Beast Boys. I still don't know why the Hand is so important. What about Beast Boy. I haven't eaten at all in a long time._ Exhaustion, Raven realized, must have been getting the best of her, because it took a moment to clamp down on all the silly questions bubbling up to her awareness. Robin blurred for a moment.

"Stay with me Raven."

"I thought you were with Star." Her joke fell flat, and she forced herself to focus.

"We have to do this quickly. I've already wasted more time than we have explaining. We have to blow up the Hand, collect Beast Boy before Slade can hurt him, and get out of here."

His words irritated her. "Beast Boy is the _reason_ I'm not clear about this plan. He's down there under the influence of the Beast. How do we get him out once this place blows?"

Robin's demeanor softened just a little at that. "We won't let anything happen to him. Just do your job and head for the exit archway as soon as the explosives go live." Her face must have done something weird, because Robin's brow crumpled in something not unlike sympathy – no, empathy. "He'll be home making your life unlivable before you know it. I promise. Leave it to us."

"Tell me how you'll retrieve him and I'll cooperate." Robin had a history of mistrusting the Beast that she might have given him a miss on, but not today.

"Star and Cy and I will. I'd let you do it yourself on any other day, a nice clean snatch-and-teleport maneuver, but you're too close to exhaustion. It'd be dangerous. For _both_ of you."

Raven took a deep breath, one that made her feel like her ribs were settling, and nodded. "Tell me where I need to go." Once she had the directions clear, she nodded again and took off, steering unsteadily but eyes wide open.

She settled to a hover near a line of miscellaneous explosives. Cyborg must have really stretched his arms to put these up, so far from the stairs. A glimmer of orange flew to the Hand's wrist. Down below her, a flutter of a cape and a faint glint of silver took position.

_One…_

_Two…_

A small detonation, an explosive birdarang somewhere below, caught her eye.

_Three. Azarath Metrion Zinthos._

The center explosive, an incendiary bomb, turned black for a second before igniting into white light.

Deafened by her own charge's explosion, Raven's only sign that the maneuver had been successful was the shadow of dust and debris spreading all over the chamber. The remaining specters went wild at the falling rock, and Raven realized they were actively avoiding the remnants of the hand.

_Head to the exit, Robin said. To the exit._

She half flew, half free fell down to ground level as the Hand of Scath fell to rubble. Dimly, she realized Robin and Cyborg had managed the demolition very well for how hurriedly the plan seemed to have been thrown together, coaxing it to collapse mostly onto itself instead of falling like a felled tree.

_Head to the exit. _She stood, unsteady amidst the wreckage and the noise, trying to locate the exit, as a small pinprick of panic in her stomach made her mind fly to what might happen if something banal like disorientation or exhaustion kept her in the doomed chamber for a second too long.

His presence appeared behind her without warning. He was masked perhaps by the chaos around them, and Raven felt the heat of him behind her before arms like tree trunks circled her middle and picked her up. As the Beast navigated to the exit archway in powerful bounds that didn't falter once, Raven wondered why she'd immediately taken his approach for a friendly gesture.

* * *

Even without its mighty front extremities to propel him forward, they made it out of the chamber faster than Raven might have expected to. The rest of the team was there, braced against the wall, and she caught the aggravated relief on Robin's face as they came into view. A few seconds later, an ungodly crash announced the permanent closure of the Chamber of the Hand to the public.

Robin gestured forward, Star and Cy detached from the wall to follow, and the Beast adjusted its grip on her before following suit. He stayed directly behind Robin the rest of the way up.

* * *

_A/N: Next chapter up within the next two days – our last chapter. Thank you to those who've stuck around so determinedly. _


	9. Terminus, Part Three: Masters of Fate

Police cars, police vans, ambulances and fire trucks were clustered in a small, brightly glowing half-moon on the largest avenue leading out of the old library district. Most of the buildings were new. Raven remembered how the four block radius had been slated for demolition when her sixteenth birthday was almost upon them. It struck her as odd that the streets were so very silent.

As they neared the barricade, Cyborg let loose an appreciative whoop. "Now there's efficiency." At the slightly surprised looks he admitted to have called in to have the area evacuated. "A lot of stuff could have gone wrong underground. We did things right by the looks of it, but I gotta hand it to Jump City Emergency Services, evacuating four blocks in the dead of night is hard."

The group paused, and the Beast lay Raven gently down on the ground, then took two, three, four steps away from them. After a beat, he slowly shrank back into Beast Boy.

His uniform was only slightly strained, and his eyes looked alert even as he pressed his hands momentarily over his ears. "Dude, I am never getting used to that." He had a five second reprieve before Raven stalked over and hugged him.

It was like Malchior all over again, her nerves and the looseness in his hesitant arms, but once he got them to move, he slung them easily across her back and waist. "Take it easy." His voice was quiet, like this was a secret between the two of them, and held a hint of a smile.

"Why?"

"You're all woozy and things." He lifted the arm on her shoulders to make an exaggerated mimicry with swiveling motions, not at all unlike a very drunk octopus, then grinned to let her know the joke was for her benefit. She graced his efforts with a tiny smile and got a monumentally goofy grin in response.

It was about then that she realized the sheer openness of her behavior and shyly retracted her arms, stepping away from his embrace. She turned around to find the rest of the team, clearly attempting to compromise between giving them space and not missing a thing.

Raven was beyond feigning ignorance. "Subtle, guys."

Cyborg shrugged. "Points for trying?" Raven snorted and clasped her elbows.

"Friend Beast Boy! You have been most amazing this night! If your speedy transformation into yourself does not lie, you have fully mastered the Beast!" Starfire's hug was much more exuberant than hers, but also considerably shorter.

Cyborg gave him a thumbs up. "What she said, BB. We thought we might need to knock you out again, to help you morph back. You handled it yourself more than pretty well."

Robin came up to him opposite to Star and quite uncharacteristically clapped him on the back, the way he did with people like Red Star and Aqualad. Raven stared, shocked but not surprised. "Incredible work Beast Boy. That was all you back there, wasn't it?"

"Mostly." The attention and praise was finally getting to him, evident in the faint maroon shadow slowly building in his cheeks. "Like I told you yesterday, the Beast is all me now. I get super hearing and super sight and super everything, and sometimes it's a little hard to think with all the sensory information I get, but it's me."

"So you can morph into the- I mean, into Beast form at will?" The question burned Raven's throat on delivery, but Beast Boy's eyes were soft and expressive when they found hers.

"No." He apparently lost his train of thought for a moment, looking at something in Raven, or perhaps inside her. "I mean, kinda. It's like a super transformation in a video game, I can't use it all the time, I've gotta wait for the power-up that makes it appear. But once it does, it's me choosing to morph, yeah."

Something fragile gently unfurled itself in Raven's chest, somewhere above her stomach, all in a flurry like a small butterfly. So brittle.

Too much.

She turned around, drawing her hood up for good measure, as Robin announced he'd have "a word with all the authorities" before they could all go home.

* * *

Raven was glad she'd been the one left worst off after the fight, at least this once: it left her free to mull things over in the relative peace of the infirmary as Cyborg gave her fluids to speed up her powers' return.

It being close to dawn, Robin had decided to debrief later in the day, and while Raven was glad for both the reprieve and the chance to let her barriers down while everyone's emotions were dulled in sleep, the questions pestering at her were about as distracting as any onslaught of emotions.

"Cyborg." Her friend looked up from where he was filling a syringe to let her know she had his attention. "What did Slade want with my f – with the Hand? And how did you figure it out?"

Cyborg didn't speak as he carefully injected something into her IV bag, a supplement of some sort. "You noticed Rob and I were already at the computer when the rest of you arrived?"

"I did."

"We'd been there the whole day cross-referencing stuff. The actual plan had to be put together while we walked there, because a lot of the pieces came up on the way, but we had a pretty good idea what was going on, and man did it help."

He checked her vitals on one of the only screens that was on. "While Titans East were manning the Tower, Slade was really quiet, but he wasn't static at all. They got a call from the local branch of an international bank, saying an account linked back to one Mr. S. Wilson had displayed movements. It wasn't a huge movement, and they probably only reported it because S. Wilson was discovered to be a dangerous criminal, and also happened to be reportedly dead. Bumblebee looked into it and filed it after a while, because it seemed to lead to nowhere, but we pulled it up."

"What was it?"

"He'd bought a copy of _Prometheus Unbound_ by Percy B. Shelley."

The words of the play bubbled up into her awareness almost at once. _Call at will/Thine own ghost, or the ghost of Jupiter/Hades or Typhon…Ask, and they must reply: so the revenge/Of the Supreme may sweep through vacant shades…_

Raven shot to a sitting position when she realized. "It's a story about doppelgangers."

"Doppelgangers, yeah…evil twin types? Something that Shelley seemed particularly interested in."

And yet she remembered how Prometheus Unbound was about said shadow twins being separate from one another. In the play, Jupiter's shade had been called forth by Prometheus, who the real Jupiter had been punishing viciously, and the shade had revealed things the real Jupiter would never have. Raven's thoughts raced. "Slade wanted the Beast. I mean…he wanted the Beast, separate from Beast Boy, and somehow bound to him." That was why he'd bothered to lure them into the catacombs, a place built to contain magical backlash and perfect for ritual work.

Cyborg radiated pride and whistled low, both attempting to lighten the atmosphere and genuinely amazed. "That was fast. It took Robin and I a bit of digging, particularly since we hadn't read the source material. We figured you might have, given the author." He sped up the drip on her IV bag. "He wanted to split Beast Boy from the Beast. Since the Hand of Scath helped summon a transdimensional demon, we guessed he thought of using it as part of a really shifty sort of ritual he put together. The Hand would be the separation device, the axe would help him sever them into separate beings, and I guess he hoped he could either charm or subdue and take the Beast for himself. We clued into the Hand being a part of things when we were already down there, or we'd have taken more explosives, better ones, or just thought of a way to smoke Slade out of there in the first place."

Raven rubbed absently at her wrist, where the needle was taped securely. "You were right."

"How?"

"Slade has never been sane."

That earned her a chuckle from Cyborg. "He still plots things out pretty damn solidly. That book was his only slip-up, because from the carvings he made on the Hand? He's either got Merlin tied up in his basement, or his new interests include sculpture and Greco-Roman sorcery." He checked the bag and nodded. "Good to go now, Rae."

"Thank you. That was clever. How you figured everything out. A little creepily so, some might say."

"_Hah!_ You know nothing. Being there, watching Robin go mini-Batman and pulling Slade's motives into something tangible outta thin air? I said exactly that, only I called it creepy right out. He told me Batman is even worse. "

"He can get _worse_?"

"He says sometimes he feels like Batman knew everything from the onset and basically planned along with the villain de jour, only he planned even further ahead and got him just by knowing how everyone would ordinarily act. They even have a name for it around the JLA, behind his back of course: Batman's Gambit."

Raven felt exasperated and affectionate all at once. "I'm glad he's on our side." Both of the hes. "I get why you did it, and this has no standing coming from me, but I wish you'd discussed this with the rest of the team."

"I don't know. It's kinda cool when all of you are too busy figuring it out and just follow the plan without argument."

"Cyborg, we're a team." She smiled, and she was teasing him a little, underneath the slight indignation at his implication that she was argumentative and hard to work with. "We do these things together. And this wasn't a team effort."

"Nope, it wasn't. We also don't use the bathroom as a team, but I don't see anyone complaining about that in the foreseeable future."

"Touché."

"You're welcome." As he unwrapped her wrist, slipped out the needle from under an alcohol-laden cotton ball, and carefully patched the resulting hole with tape and gauze, Cyborg acquired a slight inquisitive, doubting edge. "You haven't asked why we didn't want you engaging Slade, so I figured you clued in yourself."

Raven quietly fought the slight brush of nerves, saying nothing. She'd gone out to the fight laden with questions, and now she wondered if it was possible to have too many answers. Cyborg held his peace as well, but he was overflowing with a gentle, sad sort of affection as he saw helped her slide off the cot.

* * *

Dawn was coming soon.

Raven had been lying in bed, dressed in a loose black t-shirt and some ratty trunks in an attempt to relax, when a burst dam of emotions dispatched what little desire for sleep she'd had. It was an unexpected crescendo of fear and anxiety, tinged with something thrilling, something caught between the spectrum of Happy and Brave. By the time Beast Boy arrived at her door, Raven had a hard time separating his own nerves from hers.

She knew he would hesitate. And after everything that had happened, she doubted her heart could take it. A flick of her wrist had her panel door sliding open and despite all the shock he was exuding, Beast Boy did not cower.

"Hey Raven."

"Hi Beast Boy." She sat up in bed, sliding to the edge and bringing her knees protectively up to her chest. If she did not let him in, he would not ask, but he'd stay until exhaustion or disappointment drove him away. _The dice were cast on my decision a long time ago_. "You can come in."

He stepped in with a lot more certainty than he was feeling, but his fear didn't grow when the panel door shut.

"Uh oh. Didn't figure I'd be overdressed." He was still in his uniform, the one with the smallest indication of tears on his arms and legs.

"It's fine by me." Raven lowered her face into her knees, putting more of herself between her vulnerable heart and his eyes. For all that they were not evasive or probing, Raven felt like she'd been cut open from hairline to toes and her steaming, bloody guts were laid at his feet. No pretenses between them, no secrets.

Beast Boy took another few steps, reaching the midpoint between her and the door. He made as if to keep going, then stopped (not without some effort, she realized) and turned very shy. He dug into a pocket, then held the thing out to her, radiating nerves. "Uh. So. Penny for your thoughts? Heh…?"

"Are you actually going to give me a penny so I'll tell you what I'm thinking?"

"That was the plan. Sort of."

She knew it couldn't be her penny (his penny? Their penny?), knew the one he'd given her must have been obliterated when she practically died to become the portal. Even if it had returned, it would have reappeared in the Chamber they'd rendered unaccesible forever a few hours ago.

It still sent her heart racing.

"So…what _is_ on your mind?"

The offered coin reminded her of Charon the ferryman, taking souls across the river Styx to the last leg of their final journey. The thought of rivers took her to another river of Choices, and to Julius Caesar cementing his rebellion as he crossed it with his army.

"Charon and Julius Caesar"

"Huh?"

She laughed good-naturedly, shaking her head. "Never mind." Raven's eyes never left his, but she didn't move a muscle, didn't gesture at him to move any closer or away.

_As in both cases, the actual crossing I leave to you._

Beast Boy gave her a long look, the penny dropping from nerveless fingers. When he walked past the middle, he didn't hesitate again.

His hands were weaving into hers almost before Raven's mind caught up with her. He led her up – he held her hands and straightened, but the actual getting up part was left to Raven. Then they were eye to eye, and Beast Boy had the strangest expression, his mouth in a proud smirk and his eyes soft in what seemed an affectionate frown. Then he let go of her hands.

This time, Raven didn't wait for her mind to catch up as she brushed her lips over his.

They were warm, warmer than they'd felt against her small fingers, and her lips tingled where the small chapped patches dragged along her own smooth ones. Her heart tingled too, warm and full, the feeling of joy and amazement echoing from all around her and again she couldn't tell where hers ended and Beast Boy's began. She felt his lips part very slightly, felt him pull in a minute breath as she lingered, and then he was returning the kiss. Her hand had found his chin, and one of his was moving somewhere near her head, tucking a strand of her hair away behind her ear. He missed when she took a step back.

When Raven opened her eyes, Beast Boy was already looking back at her with the most tranquil smile she'd ever seen on his face. "Man, did we almost kill each other with all that no-please-after-you thing or what?" His tone was soft and earnest, and the hand that had missed was trailing fingers in her hair.

Raven wanted to retreat into the safety of chiding him for ruining the moment, but inexplicably, he hadn't. "Funny, I thought that was all me."

"I kind of knew you'd say that. So I tried to meet you half way. And not scare you. And not give you time to start thinking yourself into an emotional pretzel." He let her hair go, trailing down to where her hand hung, and threaded his fingers with hers. "It was a little hard, finding the midpoint between all those things."

"You didn't have to."

"I wanted to!"

"No, I mean…you don't have to just go along with this. It's going to be hard." _If it's even what you want. If you're not here just so I won't feel rejected._

Beast Boy was nudging her face up, so he could look into her eyes. "Being a hero is pretty hard too. And it's also something I chose."

That left her with only one question, the one she'd been the most afraid of asking. "How can you be so sure what you feel is worth this, this leap of faith?"

"What, aren't _you_ sure?"

"What do you think?" The defiance of her words didn't stop her oncoming blush.

"So why do you think I'm not sure? I mean, aren't you an empath? What are my feelings telling you right now?"

The fierce affection was tinged with nerves and edged in something else, something she remembered from after Adonis, something she might have called possessive. "Empathy doesn't really give you all the answers, funnily enough."

"Raven, the Beast only ever comes out for you. You must have noticed that. Even the first time, when I was really unstable, the only thing I knew clearly was that I had to stop Adonis from hurting you."

Raven was aware of that. And apparently everyone, including Slade, suspected it.

But Beast Boy took her silence for disbelief. "And I don't know if you noticed, but back when we first met, I was over the moon when you said I was kinda funny, but then I thought you didn't like me, and then in Nevermore it turned out you did and we were friends, but somehow you still wouldn't let me in…and then Malchior…" He gasped for breath and despite her best efforts, one short burst of a giggle escaped Raven. "And now you're laughing at me. Just awesome."

"You're kinda funny when you're babbling, no matter what I say most of the time." Beast Boy's face wasn't covered in fur. It was just green. And his eyebrows were most definitely dark green. She drew a finger through them, just because she could. "I did notice something. Back then I was a lot more unstable, and the onslaught of emotion was dangerous for all of us. You were…too much. Too much of a good thing could mean blown fuses, broken windows, anything at all back then."

"Oh. So you did notice I had a ridiculous crush on you." He ducked his head awkwardly.

"I did. And I'd be lying if I told you I was fine with it back then, but either way, the only coping mechanism I had was avoidance. Even thinking about it was too much, so I never really wondered what I felt. I'm…still trying to move past it. And…you feel different now. Not like back then."

"No…now I actually like the real you. And I know you can tell it's been confusing as hell for me to figure it out. But now I know, and you know, and everyone including _Slade_ has known for like a bajillion years. So all that's left to do is…"

"Is?"

"Is ask you if you're up for a movie and maybe something from that Chinese place you like, down the harbor. Maybe on Friday. We can go and actually sit at the place for once instead of ordering take out. They do this thing called Mapo Tofu, awesome stuff."

He made it sound so easy.

"It'll be hard. I…might withdraw for no good reason, from time to time. And things might break a lot." _And it might simply not work, despite our best intentions_. But she knew better than to tell Beast Boy something he seemed to want wouldn't work.

"I know, it'll be hard. I kinda don't care. And I don't know if you've noticed, but nothing's broken the whole time I've been here."

That caught Raven off guard, and she turned away to look around her room, dimly illuminated in pre-dawn blue. Her pillows were whole, no telltale smattering of broken pottery was anywhere on her floor. Even her sheets were only rumpled from where her hands had twisted them. She looked back at Beast Boy, face slack with awe.

"Guess I'm not at disturbing as you figured I'd be?" His smirk turned into a round O of surprise when Raven's face inched closer to his once more. Shy, slow, but no longer hesitant.

"You are, believe me. But it's easier when I don't have to hold back the feelings." _It's easier when I can just smile or just say I feel sad or just hold you and not let you go._

Beast Boy met her half way, eager hands behind her head, and Raven thought that she'd never surrendered to the inevitable with this amount of joy in her heart.

* * *

_A/N: I would like to thank all the people who've left constant support and reviews. This is the first ever attempt I've made of many things: I'd never written a chaptered fic, never __finished__ a chaptered fic, never even attempted action or action scenes, and never attempted romance in a long-haul, slow-build kind of thing. This fic has taught me a lot, and while I hope to do better in future attempts, it will remain my first successful attempt at a long storyline of any sort._

_Once more, thank you for your views, and especially your reviews. _


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